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Amazon Building Its Own Android App Market?
Thinkcloud writes "Speculation abounds that Amazon is planning their own storefront for selling Android apps, one in which they, not the developers, will set the price and decide which apps to feature (and which apps to exclude from the store all together). It's a shrewd move and smart strategy for Amazon, though its impact on app sellers is less certain."
> Just what Android needs, more fragmentation.
Yes. Because another STORE represents "fragmentation".
I can't believe anyone modded you as insightful. You're retarded. Another store just means another source of stuff to buy.
It's like the Cydia store but you don't have to hack your device first.
Yeah. That's what Frys, Best Buy, CompUSA, Tiger Direct, MicroCenter, NewEgg, Target and Walmart mean.... "fragmentation".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I don't really see the problem - isn't this one of the much touted advantages of Android, that if you don't like their store you can set up your own? If a provider locks the phone to a specific store, I'll not buy that phone from that provider, it's not like Android isn't on a huge variety of new handsets, if I wanted to be locked in, there's an App provider for that. I'm sure Amazon's aim will be, as usual, to try and stamp out the competition and become the sole gatekeeper - good look doing that when the competition is Google and they control the OS, but if it means a little competition to improve the usability of the respective stores, and perhaps a little more effort in helping the diamonds shine amongst the dross, then it's probably a good thing.
The issue here is not just that Amazon might want its own app store, a reasonable desire. The issue is that the current Android market really sucks. Google does not have good expertise in the curation methods that an appstore needs; right now, you have two options browsing the appstore: you can look at top, all-time sales. Games that have been out for two years top these charts, not surprisingly.
Or, you can look at the raw feed of 'newest'. In games, that would be 64 underwear puzzle games, three things in Japanese, and a tech demo of rotating lines, controlled by some sensor or other.
Google's traditional approach to this sort of problem is search, but search does not work well here, and there's significant market opportunity. Hence, Amazon.
Just what Android needs, more fragmentation.
Yea its terrible ... like having more than one shop in a mall or something
Yeah, Android will be fucked. I mean the ability to buy apps from a variety of sources completely and utterly destroyed the PC and Mac ecosystems. If only they'd been able to limit PCs and Macs to single stores to buy apps from, then nowadays we wouldn't be using the internet and having to work on...
Oh wait, nevermind.
BTW, I had no idea who John Gruber is, so I had to Google him. For anyone else wondering, apparently he's a blogger from Philadelphia, who graduated from Drexel University, and worked for Bare Bones software. Big names there, obviously a person that matters in the technology world.
Yes, because when more stores open up in your town, it's not economic growth and development, it's "fragmentation."
The funniest part of this comment is that Amazon is only going to be likely to gain much relevance for their own app store in their dreams. They're going to have reach, of course, but a job of convincing developers to accept their terms and come into their marketplace when they are already in _the_ marketplace used by tens of millions (soon to be hundreds of millions) of Android users. They will have to spend big to get out of the zone of irrelevancy. It sounds like a miscalculation born of arrogance to me.
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We'll see about that. If Amazon provides a market place where more copies are sold or it's easier for people to find the particular app, the developers may go for it anyways.
In the phone world you rarely have "choice" and as the parent mentioned, most carriers will lock you into something you don't want. For example, Verizon/Samsung have decided that Bing should be the search engine of choice on their smart phones. Not exactly a big deal, except there is absolutely NO way to change it over to Google, if you so desire. I can see the same thing here. Amazon/Verizon ink a deal, and all VZ phones now ship with the default Amazon market, and Google Market is no where to be found. If you actually had a choice, then I don't have a big problem for allowing multiple markets, search engines, etc. Sure, it brings confusion, but in this case, the "choice" isn't yours...it's the handset and service provider making that choice for you.
I live in a country where Android phones are either hideously overpriced ($600 for a Galaxy S? Tigger please.) or bundled with a service plan offering more voice minutes in a month than I'll use in a year. So I'm in the market for an Android PDA or Android PMP like those made by Archos, not another phone with another phone bill. An Apple fan might describe it as "Android pod touch". But I'm not aware of one Android device without a cellular radio that Google has officially approved for use with its store. So developers who don't feel like competing with established apps on Google's store can target Android devices that lack 3G and sell on AppsLib and this Amazon store in addition to Google's store.
Wait a minute ... Amazon gets to set the price? So you want to sell at $3 and they can decide you can only sell at $0.49? Or at $10? WTF am I missing here
It's a shop. You must use shops some times. The shop owner typically decides the selling price. The price you are willing to see at to Amazon is up to you. The price Amazon is willing to pay you is up to Amazon. The price Amazon is willing to sell to the public at is decided by Amazon. The price the public is willing to pay is decided by the public. Amazon can have loss leaders or 200% mark ups. It's a shop.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
Yeah. That's what Frys, Best Buy, CompUSA, Tiger Direct, MicroCenter, NewEgg, Target and Walmart mean.... "fragmentation".
Yes, they do mean fragmentation. In fact, fragmentation is exactly what it is. Fragmentation of electronics sales into separate and competing entities. The mistake is believing fragmentation is automatically bad instead of a driving force to present the best, safest and cheapest option.
Brick and mortar stores are not relevant to this discussion.
Say I have an app I am actively developing and maintaining. One central distribution mechanism means that I can focus my time on writing and updating it, upload the .apk file, and go on my merry way. I eyeball the reviews, and make sure to take heed of any constructive critiques for the next revision of the app.
With multiple app stores, each of which has different rules, each of which are present or absent on different phones, in order to have my app available to as many users, I have to jump through every store's hoops. I also have to pay each store's ticket to entry. Google's store is very reasonable, just pay your $25 and you can play. However, with other stores in the mix, they can set prices any way they feel like. They can also set many restrictive conditions.
Want to know where the shit will really hit the fan? When stores demand exclusivity. If store "A" demands I only can use them, then any Android device that ships with store "B" and only store "B" on their device, my app is locked out of that market. This definitely will fragment Android far worse than it is now.
Don't forget that as of now, one can sideload and install via ADB on almost all devices. However, both of those abilities can easily be removed in a new model of phone forcing people to either get their apps from the store or do without.
Of course, there is the slippery slope: What happens if cellular carriers want to hop in this pool? More stores are not better in this choice, because I'm sure some carriers would only allow access to their specific store and no others.
It would be especially good if all the apps were thoroughly tested. With all the stories lately about Android apps
grabbing/using personal data it might be nice to have an app store where they tell you exactly what data it uses.
Even things like how much processor & memory it uses while active would be useful info. Or how well it runs on
different screen sizes. I have no idea if any of the stores already do this as my 11 year old nokia phone doesnt
have apps.
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
It's a travesty that stores get to set the prices for anything that they sell! And they get to choose what they sell! In the name of freedom we must force stores to sell what we want them to sell and at the price we want to sell it at!
I'm hoping they will offer Amazon products and media.
I'm not really interested in buying Android apps from them but I'll happily buy their books, music, movies, and other merchandise. And when I do I don't want some other company taking a cut or interfering in the process.
And though I doubt that I would be buying apps from them rather then the Google Market, I wouldn't rule it out.
No, this is nothing like price fixing. Price fixing is when the majority of sellers of a given product to a certain market agree to set the same price, to artificially control supply and demand.
It could be price fixing if Amazon and Google where fixing the price between themselves and sell the apps for the same price, regardless of the app developers' wishes.
(this is horizontal price fixing. There is also vertical, when the producer colludes with the retailers. This also doesn't happen here, and besides it isn't illegal according to the US Supreme Court).
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Back in the days of DOS before Win95 took over the PC world, when the PC market was growing, while what you say was largely true as written, you have to remember that there was a lot less abstraction of hardware, and that the diversity (in the PC world) of hardware was at least as significant as the diversity of customized Android OS software and hardware combined (and, that there were quite a few versions of MS/PC-DOS, and toward the end of the period a few clones, floating around simultaneously as OS software), and yet the PC software market did quite well (and, once the Mac was around, better than the market for Mac software despite the latters more uniform target platform.)
If the store has apps that people want, there will be a pressure for the carriers not to lock it out, or their phones sales will suffer.
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I'm a luddite because my phone does everything I need it to do (work as a phone)?
When I want a camera I use a camera. When I need internet access I use a PC.
I have nothing against technology, I just dont see the point in paying for something
I wont use.
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
I don't know. Are they? You tell us...
How about we post the news article if they announce one? I really hate these speculative 'question' posts.
New Android phone to have six buttons?
Display manufacturers to use synthetic sapphire glass?
Tommy Lee Jones to star in new motion picture?
Why can't submissions provide actual sources? In this particular case, we got a link to a blog - which linked to another blog - which linked to a techcrunch article - which linked to another techcrunch article - which linked to a dev mailing list. Would it have been so hard to provide the direct link to at least the techcrunch article which provided far more details than the random blog analysis of the same?
It would be really awesome if somebody took it upon themselves to build a store rather more like Apple's than what Android currently has. There are a lot of strengths to that model, where each app is thoroughly tested and run through a vetting process to ensure it performs as advertised, is malware free, and doesn't eat through system resources so as to make the phone a piece of worthless slag once installed. The weakness comes in the fact that, on iPhone, it's mandatory (without a jailbreak); questionable rejections and potential censorship are merely the symptoms, secondary vendors would render them largely moot (and probably cut down on them, ultimately).
I'm planning to go Android on my next phone, partly because I prefer the OSS aspect, partly because they're a bit cheaper, partly because it gives me more choices for network and price, and largely because I can't fucking stand using Apple products... they make me irrationally angry and frustrated, and prolonged exposure just enrages me.
Apropo nothing, I have similar feelings of unwarranted hatred toward Owl City, and am similarly driven toward bloodlust whenever I'm subjected to his music. It has no bearing on this article, but I want to Raid every single firefly in the world, then shove a Dremel into his eye socket. To paraphrase St. Carlin: this isn't a pet peeve, it's an irrational fucking hatred.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
Android already tells you exactly what data an app can access. You have to grant those permissions when you install it. The apps can't look at anything you don't give them permission to. Your job is to pay attention to those permission dialogs - I certainly do.
That's not exactly how it works. First of all, its not exclusive of Google services, and secondly, anyone can install third party apps on their Android phone without rooting it. Feel free to install some other search apk instead.
I guess it kind of depends on how much the provider locked your phone down. If they removed the Google Marketplace and the ability to add a store, I guess you're wrong on that count. What the parent says is that Android's openness gives liberty to the carrier. The carrier will decide what liberty is left to you and what liberty is kept from you. In other word, it's not Android that gives you liberty but it is the phone maker+carrier that may give you freedom. Or rooting, but on that count the iPhone is as open as Android.
Write boring code, not shiny code!