Amazon Fire Phone

» see amazon.com/firephone as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

in 2014 i was on an android phone in ankara, on a turkcell line. amazon fire phone was an at&t exclusive in the us, $199 on a two-year contract, and it never had a turkish carrier path or a turkish language pack. so it never showed up. the phone i did not buy was, by every available account, the worst flagship phone of the year.

bezos had been working on it for four years. fire phone was the answer to a question only amazon was asking: what if a phone existed entirely to make buying things on amazon easier. the firefly button on the side, when you pressed it, recognized barcodes and song clips and routed you to the amazon listing for the thing it had heard. dynamic perspective, the four-camera trick on the front, tilted the ui as you moved your head. neither feature did anything anyone needed.

it launched on 25 july 2014. within six weeks the price collapsed from $199 on contract to 99 cents. by october amazon had taken a $170 million write-down and reported $83 million of unsold inventory in a warehouse. analysts estimated total sales in the low tens of thousands. amazon killed production in august 2015 and quietly stopped talking about the device. bezos later called it "a bold bet," which is what executives say when a thing fails and they want to keep the option to bet again later.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the gimmick ~

dynamic perspective worked, technically. four front-facing cameras tracked your face in real time and shifted the lock-screen elements with parallax. it was a real engineering feat. it was also useless. nobody bought a phone to look at parallax wallpapers, and the cameras drained the battery faster than any other phone on the market that year.

firefly was the same problem in a different shape: it solved a friction the user did not have. you were already on amazon five times a week. you did not need a hardware button to get there faster. and firefly was wrong often enough that a search box was just better.

~ the decline ~

the deeper problem was distribution and stack. fire phone ran fire os, amazon's android fork without google play services. that meant no gmail and no google maps. amazon's own app store had perhaps a tenth of the catalog. on top of that, at&t was the only us carrier carrying it, which already excluded most of the country. the international launch never happened. nothing about the phone was meant for anyone outside the us.

~ the funny part ~

bezos has said publicly that the fire phone failure was useful, because the team that built it became the team that built echo and alexa. that is true and also a retrofit. the actual phone was a $200 million lesson that amazon could not turn shopping convenience into a hardware platform. echo turned it into voice instead, which was a different bet that worked. the phone was the cost of finding that out.

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