This one honestly makes no sense to me. How is this company being valued at a Billion dollars with a flagship product that is indistinguishable in features and price from any of its competitors. Who the hell is going to gamble on a new, no name brand for a $700 product that is exactly like the very reputable products from Apple, Samsung, and 50 other phone manufacturers?!?
Basically the reason this thing gets $300 million is because Andy Rubin is at the helm:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Rubin
His track record is amazing (Danger/Android).
I agree 100% with everything you have said but I'm willing to see where this goes based solely on his reputation.
Surely their is something more to this than just building a high end Android phone with a little privacy tech thrown in.
> His track record is amazing (Danger/Android).
Let's not fool ourselves: Android gained momentum because it was what was there when Google needed it; it's not a particularly well engineered or cohesive system. Everything down to the very basics is rushed and haphazardly thrown together, and I cannot see any improvement (Kotlin is a smart move to exfiltrate from the legal corner Google has painted itself with Java-the-Language, but the fact that this came from a 3rd party is pretty telling).
> Kotlin is a smart move to exfiltrate from the legal corner Google has painted itself with Java-the-Language, but the fact that this came from a 3rd party is pretty telling
Android is open, most good ideas come from the community. The fact that Google chose Kotlin over Go shows that there is very little politics in Android, the best technology often wins.
>The fact that Google chose Kotlin over Go shows that there is very little politics in Android, the best technology often wins.
In what world is Go a realistic consideration in this discussion ? Android is built on top of a JVM - Go is a native language with no JVM access. Not to mention it has nothing to do with Go target domain.
Google already has an alternative mobile OS with Fuchsia and the front-end Flutter stack is built on their Dart language which can be viewed as a Java alternative without the JVM. Kotlin is the only practical alternative to Java on Android because of technical reasons (Scala stdlib is too big and the compile time ends up being too painful) - but I don't see how it has anything to do with the legal aspect (the entire platform is still built on top of JVM and tons of Java code).
It actually works rather well, specially as a C++ replacement.