Amazon's entry into the smartphone market with the Amazon Fire Phone was a disaster. It was launched in 2014 at a price tag of $650, and later reduced to $130, amid poor sales. Shortly afterwards the Fire Phone was discontinued. Now it looks like Amazon is trying to get back into the business once again, not with a new smartphone, but by providing its service to phone vendors.
According to a report from The Information, Amazon is talking with Android OEMs at a factory level, to replace the Android ecosystem with its Fire OS. The world's largest e-commerce retailer wants them to facilitate a deeper integration with Amazon services into their handsets.
Amazon's shopping apps already comes pre-loaded on various devices, but the online giant is looking to go way beyond that with deeper integration of their platform. Unlike other OEMs, that ship their device with pre-loaded apps from their partners, Amazon wants its partners' handset to resemble the Amazon's Kindle Fire tablets. The phones will come with a range of Amazon apps, fostering users to purchase products for the retailers.
However, the report did not provide any other details of what to expect from this deeper integration and does not mention names of OEMs, Amazon intends to work with. It appears to be that Amazon's aim is to work with smartphone makers, to build phones that have their own software at factory level instead of Google's Android.
For reference, Google provides its Android operating ecosystem free to smartphone manufacturers, as a way to increase adoption, but controls API (application operating ecosystem), and the vendors are required to host Google's service on their device, what we call as bloatware.
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