Now this is a rather interesting and surprisingly draconian story about Google throwing their weight around. The story goes that a phone collaboration between the Acer and Alibaba was shelved at the very last minute!
Google and Acer had been planning to launch the ‘CloudMobile A800’ smartphone together with Android ICS, recently however Android has been swapped out for Aliyun, which is Alibaba’s new OS. The latter variant was due for release soon, but Reuter’s has said the event was written off after Acer was told that “Google would terminate Android product cooperation” if the phone was revealed.
Unsurprisingly Acer has been schtum on the matter, but Alibaba has been harder to silence, they came out and announced that “Our partner received notification from Google that if the new product launch with Aliyun went ahead, Google would terminate Android product cooperation and related technical authorization with Acer.” The company went on to say that Google’s decision was “clearly unfair to consumers” and it’s pretty hard to disagree.
At the moment we have no idea what the next move will be and we don’t expect to hear anything out of Google or Acer soon! Perhaps it was Aliyun’s plan to run Android apps which tipped the balance?!?!
But, we’ll leave you with Alibaba’s take on the whole situation; “We believe that by introducing the Aliyun OS we are giving consumers and hardware makers more options which is the foundation of a healthy and strong market. We think that it should be left to the market to decide.”
Via Slashgear.