Amazon says no Google allowed

Amazon appears to be succeeding where many others are trying to succeed: using Android for their own mobile sales and services strategy, free from the clutches of Google.

This is no surprise. Amazon wants the emphasis on its app store, its digital media ecosystem, its payments platform, its recommendation services, its cloud infrastructure, its brands. Hell, even the Amazon designed browser for the Android-based Kindle Fire seeks to keep Google out. 

A Kindle Fire user is, in Amazon's view, an Amazon customer. Not a Google customer.

Only, I did not know this: per Xconomy, Amazon is, apparently, not even allowing others to use Google for their Kindle Fire apps. This could get interesting:

As a much more stripped-down device, primarily intended for media consumption and shopping, the Kindle Fire doesn’t have GPS capabilities. And even though the Kindle Fire is based on a version of Google’s Android mobile operating system, Amazon has aggressively asserted its independence from Google with the Kindle Fire.

That has meant keeping Google Maps out of Amazon’s Android app store, and telling Kindle Fire developers not to include any features based on Google’s Mobile Services—even though that meant the mega-retailer didn’t have its own in-app purchasing system when the device was rolled out.

So, to make its maps work on the Kindle Fire’s version of Android, Zillow’s app offers a mobile version of its regular online maps—which are already supplied in almost all cases by Bing. GPS-enabled services are turned off on the Kindle Fire app, but users can still search for an address or location to find homes they’re interested in scoping out.

That’s why you saw Zillow making a big deal out of the fact that it was “the only map-based real estate app on the platform” when it announced the app as one of the first to be available for the Kindle Fire.

Good stuff.