Amazon poised to take one of Google’s most critical assets

The practice of successfully building and selling an “Android-compatible device” is much different than the theory.

First off, there’s the fact that Honeycomb has never been open-sourced. Android’s public repositories cap off with Gingerbread, which puts independent tablet makers in a bind.

Secondly, royalties on Android devices are essentially taking the place of licensing fees at this point — you can't actually use Android for “free” on a commercial device without attracting attention from Microsoft’s lawyers.

But third — and this is key — Android is significantly devalued as a consumer platform if you don't have Google’s blessing to ship your product. You lose the suite of Google services that users are automatically expecting when they take your device out of the box, including Gmail, Maps and the official Android Market. It’s been said a thousand times before that a vibrant, easily-accessible ecosystem of third-party apps is central to a successful mobile product — and if you lose the Market, you lose that ecosystem. Independently-launched devices (particularly tablets) have tried to make up the difference with their own aftermarket app stores, but when “success” is measured in hundreds of thousands of available titles, there’s simply no substitute for the real thing. Or is there? When the Amazon Appstore launched in March of this year following a lengthy, low-key test with developers, it was immediately evident that the company had an opportunity to challenge the official Android Market’s dominance in a way that no one else had been able to do.