Why does it seem no one else is excited about Amazon’s Android fork?

We can all assume that Amazon’s upcoming tablet will probably sell pretty well. At half the price of other tablets and sitting on equal ground with its primary competition, the Nook Color, this should be a win, win for Amazon and consumers alike. That is not really whats exciting about this product though.

What excites me is the fact that Amazon decided to fork Android. I’m surprised that no one is making any real noise about this, as it’s a pretty big deal and something I thought I would see sooner in an open source project. Yes we have projects such as AOSP (the Google sanctioned fork), CyanogenMod or MIUI, but these are more akin to branching then a true fork in the development, as they still rely on the current code provided by Google and are for the most part completely compatible.

For anyone active in the community, please do not take this as a slight to your contributions. I am merely making this statement to contrast the difference between what is being done in the ROMs listed above and what is being done by Amazon. They are two entirely different animals. 

As Anuj Ahooja noted at techthirst.com and the repost at androidactivist.org the only real fork we have in Android presently is Honeycomb.  It should be fairly common knowledge in the community by know that the Honeycomb fork is not a mainstay and that it will be merged back into the AOSP trunk with the release of Ice Cream Sandwich.

There are some great examples of how forking software can bring about changes that none of the developers or user-base would have expect. The XBMC code fork is a great example of this. From the code base of XBMC we as a community have received projects such as  Boxee and Plex. Both of these forks bring their own unique ideas of what a media player should be to the table. Because of this, all three forks have grown in ways they never could have without each other.

Linux distributions in general are Forks as they all share a lineage with a few notable distribution. Ubuntu is a good well-known example of this. The Debian distribution was forked many times over the past decade, two of those forks, Knoppix and Ubuntu spawned a multitude of their very own forks.

I will be interesting to see if anyone in the Android development community can manage to create a community based fork on the same level as what Amazon is attempting. One such group did announce just such a fork and created a bit of excitement in the community and the tech scene in general earlier this year, with the announcement of IcedRobot.  This Android fork will be based on OpenJDK and is meant to circumvent all of Oracle’s patent lawsuits, while at the same time allowing it to run on other platforms and operating systems. It is extremely likely that if IcedRobot can manage to reach their goal, we will see several more forks come from it.

Let me be clear that if this ever does come to fruition, that this will NEVER be part of the public’s Android consumption. This will be for geeks only and over time could turn into one hell of a geeks playground.

I know what some of you may be thinking, “What about the core Google Apps and the Market?”.  I am a big fan of most of Google services in and out of Android, but they are not the only talented group of programmers in the world. We could see any number of improvements made in the form of replacements for theses apps. We could even see Google themselves taking note of the improvements and bringing them back into the main stream version of the OS.  I will point you back up above to the XBMC example to show that this is very possible and possibly very beneficial to the community as a whole.