Nokia just announced a line of phones running Android, which don’t actually make use of Google services. It’s a pretty bad idea, but I like the quote coming from the management suite:
“While apps that use only AOSP should run on the X phones directly, any apps that for example integrate with location or store services will need porting, a process that Stephen Elop said should take a few hours.”
It’s this kind of detachment from developers that got Microsoft into trouble in the first place with all of their attempts to develop and to capture smartphone mindshare. With a divorced-from-reality quote like that, who would actually want to bother porting their app to the “Microsoft Android App Store”? It’s like Captain Picard saying “Make it so.”, except in that case, shit actually gets done.
Go big or go home, make the Windows Phone platform strong enough and big enough to compete for app revenue, or don’t bother. A move like this is just reheated Symbian strategy. I do not see how this is competitive at all, in a market flooded with low- and mid-range Chinese competitors that do already access the full range of Google services.