Pathik Shah

How Google Could Eliminate the Amazon Threat to Android

Google is supposed to be focusing on Apple, which is currently dominating the tablet market with the iPad. Instead, it has been forced to fend off another major threat to Android – the Amazon Kindle Fire. The Kindle Fire is the biggest threat to Google, which has been trying to minimize the fragmentation of Android, and ironically, is the most popular Android tablet yet. Even so, Google has been completely locked out of the Kindle Fire ecosystem, so it probably won’t see a dime of revenue generated by the Kindle Fire.

Google is rumored to be working on a Nexus tablet to compete with the iPad, but apparently, the Nexus tablet will be an inexpensive $199 Android tablet powered by ICS which will compete with the Kindle Fire.

If Google is indeed working on such a tablet, it should stop right away.

Launching a $199 Android 4.0 tablet will not only severely impact sales of all other Android tablets and alienate its device partners like Samsung and HTC, but it will also mean Google taking a financial hit. Amazon itself is losing $10-$20 per tablet, and hopes to make money by selling Kindle content.

Here’s what Google should do instead:

Make it extremely easy to install Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich on the Kindle Fire. Launch a one-click flashing tool to flash an Android 4.0 ROM on the Kindle Fire.

This would not only give it back control of the Android ecosystem, but it would also be a huge hit to Amazon, which would continue to lose money on each Kindle Fire sold with no direct way to make it back.

I ‘m not getting into the technical specifics of how it would work; I’m sure Google can figure it out.

In case it can’t be done officially, Google can always bankroll such a project or help XDA developers develop such a pure Android 4.0 ICS ROM for the Kindle Fire.

This way, Google won’t alienate its tablet hardware partners, it won’t lose money selling cheap tablets, and it can focus on its main enemy – the Apple iPad.