This is really the dumbest, most unnecessary drama that Amazon has needed to face with absolutely zero gain. The entire chain of command who approved this decision should get fired, because who knows what other dumb decisions they will make.
Bias note: I've been an Amazon SDE for the last few years, though no where near the devices division (I make warehouses and delivery systems work better, weee). Additional note: in no way do I speak for the company, I'm just a guy who writes code and likes working here.
Generally speaking, this isn't how Amazon operates.
Firing someone for making a bad call is silly. Mistakes were clearly made but firing people in situations like this is like cutting off your hand because you burned your finger. The person who made the call probably has made hundreds of good calls over the years, and will continue to make good calls in the future, given the chance. Sure, if this is a pattern of stupid mistakes then clearly this person is in the wrong role, but that's not nearly as likely to be the case.
Instead, I suspect a process will be put in place to help make these decisions better in the future- and process written in large part by the person who made the mistake. This way, not only will they not make a mistake like this again, but no one else will either.
Maybe I'm wrong, but from what I've seen of the Amazon culture that's how we generally react to mistakes.
That is exactly the right culture. If someone makes a series of blunders, without the history of good choices, that's one thing (maybe they need to be in a different position?), but simply firing someone over one decision is usually very bad for morale, and doesn't really teach anyone anything.
It's better to lean on the side of consequences than freedom, given that their incentives are only partly aligned with the shareholders.
They'll do stupid M&A, plunder money on consultants and make up bullshit all for something to do. Management tends to be more of an autocracy than meritocracy and a good business needs to push against that.
If you are lenient and you give them time to figure it out - they just use that leniency on themselves instead of the company.
FWIW, when the Kindle Fire launched, the major "breakthrough" feature was that it would pipe all your web traffic through Amazon's servers in EC2 (for browsing acceleration)...
I had never heard of this until your comment. I did a bit of research on this and have to say it is one of the least well advertised feature of any software I've seen in awhile- after a bunch of searching I found it on the bottom of the chrome privacy whitepaper[1], where it's referred to as "Data Saver".
This feature is actually pretty cool. It only hijacks http traffic (leaving https the same) but pushes that traffic over an encrypted channel to google. This has some pretty positive benefits if you're the type of person who connects to random wifi, although there's apparently a simple way for network admins to disable the feature (if they block a certain webpage form loading chrome will go back to working like normal).
The other major thing- and the reason I looked into this to begin with- is that it's opt in. So if you're like me and freaked out that google was spying on you after reading ikeboy's comment then you can relax now.
Opera did it way better. It wasn't long ago that in markets with 2G and Edge, Opera Mini was as ubiquitous as WhatsApp is today. They really executed it brilliantly. I rem browsing webpages with 1MiB or more being reduced to 40KiB.
I tend to go through every option of software when I begin using it, at least on a mobile device where there usually aren't too many settings. There are only like 10 settings on chrome mobile, and this is one, documented at https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2392284?hl=en
I have a Kindle Fire HD 8 Tablet. Amazon has clearly optimized the software for it. For example it has three types of memory. Flash for storage, RAM for main memory and (presumably) slower RAM that is used as swap space. Most Android devices run a linux kernel without any swap space configured. But the Fire Tablet swaps (which is why it can run Android 5+ with only 1Gb of RAM I suspect). It has two processors. A slow processor that uses less battery, and a faster one which is switched on when needed.
My point is that Amazon tried really hard to give a good experience with lower end hardware then most Android devices. Encryption likely adds a significant performance cost.
Keep in mind, the iPhone has hardware support for its encrypted memory. It is my understanding that the main processor does not get involved in the actual encryption of the flash storage. Because Apple controls the hardware and the software, they can do this tight integration. Android is software and encryption on Android must be done in software unless and until a hardware vendor integrates bulk encryption into their memory system and provides an appropriate driver for Android to control it. If such a device exists, I haven’t seen it yet...
No, Android works just fine on lower end hardware. I have a very old phone running 5.x smooth as butter (the 3" Xperia Mini, single core Cortex-A8, 384MB RAM, running LegacyXperia).
However, I could turn my phone into a pile of mud (and you could probably do this too with your kindle fire) by installing Google Apps, in particular google play services.
This whole story seems overblown. Amazon removed a feature that nobody would ever use, and people imagined some conspiracy.
A Kindle Fire is not a desktop computer, it's somewhere between a television and a crappy web browser. Amazon Silk is so painful to use that you'll never browse the web with it for more than a minute or two anyway, why care about encrypting your browsing history? Would anybody care about encrypting the local storage on their TiVo?
My guess is that this went: "Oh, here's a feature that 0.5% of our users have tried, and 50% of them contacted support for help turning it off (because it slowed down video playback), let's kill it." (Mwahahaha?)
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Also, the devices are mainly designed to deliver digital entertainment, instead of being used as communication tools. That suggests there’s less of a chance users will have any sensitive personal information stored on their Fire tablets.
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Amazon removed encryption from the devices in late 2015, possibly to reduce costs for its tablets and electronic readers. The devices aren’t intended for communication of sensitive data, although they can be used to access the Internet and e-mail.
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>The Amazon Fire OS 5 Bellini will come with the latest tablets from Amazon and will be available for older tablets via an over the air update in the coming months
The most likely reason for encryption to be removed is simply that the two engineers on the Kindle Enterprise team who implemented the feature both left the company a year and a half ago. The remaining engineer on the device side portion of that team moved on to another project. The integration, security review, etc with the SoC vendor is fairly complex, and the expertise required to build out encryption was lost. The original integration took quite a while as well. Most of the speculation as to why Amazon removed it seems pretty out there.
If they had done this earlier, nobody would have cared, because likely nobody's storing any sensitive information on these devices. Their timing was really bad.
Amazon likely had been looking at Apple and felt extricating themselves from the potential to be in Apple's position was financially advantageous. Seeing them reverse course suggests to me that the PR backlash was more than Amazon could stand and made them think the situation they were trying to avoid was better.
Not sure, why you're downvoted, that's probably exactly what happened. It's a huge company, there are a lot of moving pieces, and the original decision probably didn't travel too far up the food chain. Some Dev Manager or Director was optimizing for device speed and figured it was a worthwhile tradeoff. When the rest of the company found out they probably quickly reacted and flipped out, much as the rest of the world did.
