I bought a Fire tablet and I swore "never again" after that experience. I sold it on Craig's list and bought a Nexus 7. Couldn't be happier.
The fact that Amazon has a separate store really ticked me off. Lots of apps I was used to on my phone couldn't be used on the Fire. And, the fact that the Fire was based on Android 2.x and really never got better, well, that was really annoying, too.
So, when their phone was announced, even before I knew one thing about it, I was completely uninterested.
It's not Google Play Services so much as most app developers won't even bother with doing the app submission process for Amazon, which to date is a PITA (clunky web interface, smaller user base, waiting for someone to review your app which may get rejected when you can just go the easy route with Google Play).
Imho the "Google Services as blocker" is way worse than it's normally recognized:
If you want to use a faux-taxi or similar service, Lyft, Sidecar, Flywheel and Uber all need the Google Play Services to work.
The sad thing, is that Sidecar is available on the Amazon store, but since there's no way to explicitly state the dependency of an application on Google's libraries, it will just crash at installation/runtime with a segfault (due to not being able to load a .so)
Only after going back to a device with the Google services I realized that you can actually use Uber from your mobile browser (it's at m.uber.com, but if you visit uber.com from your mobile there're no prominent links that point to the former)
Those are all apps that I'd expect to use Google's location service, which costs money to keep updated so I can understand Google restricting it. Maybe Amazon should provide (or buy) their own location service and provide a common API?
granted, this might not be as fully-featured as Google's (I never used either), but given the existence of Openstreetmap and other efforts like the Nogapps project http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1715375 there should be enough manpower to build a solid alternative.
It's a bit sad that Amazon is not capitalizing/building-on/improving OSS, but it's even more sad that 99% (random estimate) of the (western?) Android apps are constraining themselves to run only on Google-licensed devices
I think that for many (most?) Fire tablet users, not having Google Play is a minor issue at best. I have many people in my family that love their Fire tablets to death. They aren't even impressed by the iPad. It just does everything they need with no Play Store required. Read books, Facebook, web, games, movies (with Prime/Netflix) etc.
I own a Fire HDX 7" and it is a pretty amazing tablet. The many apps that integrate with Google Play Service for no good reason, like a password manager like 1Password, is pretty depressing though. I can't get the latest version of it. I would probably buy an Android tablet if I didn't have so many videos on Amazon's video store. I wish they would just make their videos available on Android. Amazon is supposed to be platform independent but they haven't made any videos available on Android and it fucking sucks. They're the only company that makes their content available across devices, and now they're not even doing that anymore. Why can't videos be portable. It sucks. It really sucks, and they're not doing this in the best interest of their customers.
"The many apps that integrate with Google Play Service for no good reason, like a password manager like 1Password, is pretty depressing though."
AIUI, "Google Play Services" are basically "Android updates for the Android phones that we can't upgrade because carriers won't do it". Everything ends up integrated into it because if you want one up-to-date service Android provides, you'll end up getting it through that. Otherwise the app developer is stuck on just the lowest-common-denominator.
I learned this because I have a phone running 2.2 that if I let it upgrade to Google Play Services, and then upgrade all the other stock apps on the phone that want to use it (YouTube, Gmail), leaves me without about 10MB of space on the device left over. So I shut off the upgrades. I'm not in a hurry to upgrade because it's just not what I want to do with the money.
> I learned this because I have a phone running 2.2 that if I let it upgrade to Google Play Services, and then upgrade all the other stock apps on the phone that want to use it (YouTube, Gmail), leaves me without about 10MB of space on the device left over. So I shut off the upgrades. I'm not in a hurry to upgrade because it's just not what I want to do with the money.
I've been in a similar boat. The way storage partitions were handled on 2.x era devices makes the larger sizes of apps and Google Play Services really noticeable.
Yes, it's annoying (if understandable) that Amazon has not made Prime streaming video available for stock Android but only for Fire devices--and for iOS tablets. I watch Prime video all the time on my iPad. Stupid, but what can you do (other than avoid Fire devices on general principle).
The fact that Amazon has a separate store really ticked me off. Lots of apps I was used to on my phone couldn't be used on the Fire. And, the fact that the Fire was based on Android 2.x and really never got better, well, that was really annoying, too.
So, when their phone was announced, even before I knew one thing about it, I was completely uninterested.