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Lenovo Switches To Stock Android For All Future Smartphones (ndtv.com)
Lenovo is canning its Vibe Pure UI Android skin in favor of the stock version of Google's mobile OS for its future smartphones, starting with the upcoming K8 Note, according to an interview from Gadgets 360 with Anuj Sharma, Lenovo India's head of marketing. From a report: Lenovo has confirmed that going forward, it will be abandoning its Vibe Pure UI Android customisation which ran on top of its recent Android smartphones in almost all markets. "What we have done in last 11 months is we looked at what we had in terms of software perspective. We have been close to the consumers and we saw what they were asking for. There was a certain trend and we have now decided to cut the Vibe Pure UI off from our phones. So you will now get the stock Android which consumers have been asking for," Sharma told Gadgets 360.
I actually think this is one area where they listened to their customers AND were able to cut costs. Why did they spend money to alter the interface a la Samsung and wind up with an non-updatable mess. Samsung does it to fuck the customer into upgrades.
Listened to customers my foot.
Android manufacturers can't differentiate themselves on hardware. The hardware and the suppliers are the same for everyone, and the market is absolutely saturated with every possible combination of hardware features at the top, bottom and everything in between range. Gimmicks like iris readers and fingerprint scanners don't seduce customers.
The only place where they can actually differentiate is software. Samsung leads the pack here with custom software left and right. Lo and behold, they are the top Android manufacturer.
Lenovo adopting a stock Android basically signals a surrender. They realised that their software is crap, and since they can't compete on hardware because the market is saturated, they dropped the software customizations to try to recoup some losses.
In 2 years, Lenovo's Android division will be gone.