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Amazon To Launch 'Amazon Appstore For Android'
angry tapir writes "Amazon is preparing to open an Android app store to compete with Google's Android Market, and has launched a beta portal where developers can submit applications for Android-based smartphones. The applications will be sold on the Amazon Appstore for Android, which the company expects to launch later this year. At launch, the Appstore will be available for customers in the US, and it will be compatible with Android 1.6 and higher. Users will be able to shop for applications from their PCs, which isn't possible with the existing version of Android Market, or from their smartphones, and pay with their existing Amazon account."
What's the point? It's easy enough to share/sell an application on Google's Android App store...
since it doesn't specify the V7 processor. I wanted to port my firefox plugin to android and I had to go with a newer android build because FF requires the V7 spec processor.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Gawd I luv a parade !!
can't wait for an amazon app store.
Was wondering when Amazon was going to enter the fray.
They already have a music store, selling apps isn't that big of a jump.
Already having peoples credit card numbers and the trust of most will also helps.
"Users will be able to shop for applications from their PCs, which isn't possible with the existing version of Android Market"
Guess they haven't heard about AppBrain.
http://www.appbrain.com/app/appbrain-app-market/com.appspot.swisscodemonkeys.apps
So in addition to the hardware fragmentation, there will be store fragmentation too. Sounds great.
Wouldn't it be great if Amazon could open a competing Apple app store, and then people could have free choice to buy wherever they please, just like in the real world?
That'd be anti-capitalist, though.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
it's also basically the iPhone app store, on Android. gee that's what we've always wanted.
To submit applications, developers first need an Amazon account. Amazon recommends creating a new account for the Appstore Developer Program. Joining the program will cost US$99 a year, compared to Google's one-time $25 registration fee for Android Market. However, Amazon will waive the fee during the first year of the program.
Amazon reserves the right to set retail prices for applications, although developers may indicate a "list price" which must be less than or equal to the list price for all current and previous versions of the app, whether on Amazon Appstore or elsewhere. Amazon will pay developers 70 percent of the purchase price of the application or 20 percent of the list price, whichever is greater.
Unlike Google, Amazon will have an approval process for applications submitted to its store. The company will be testing the apps to verify that they work as outlined in the product description, and that they don't impair the functionality of the smartphone or put customer data at risk once installed, Amazon said. Offensive content, including pornography, is prohibited. What Amazon deems offensive "is probably about what you would expect," it says. Amazon will also stop applications that infringe user's privacy.
when the first apps will be remotely removed from phones?
Fandroids hate facts.
Another site offering largely the same apps as the main android site thereby having the exact same 'Most Popular' and 'Top Paid', do.not.want. What about an Android/Amazon partnership, where they both offer different things tailored to their own markets, with no dupes.
http://www.awfullybigmoustache.com
for the carriers to do bugger all except charge.
Need I remind you of what the state of the market was before Apple introduced the iPhone?
There were NO APPS!
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
The more interesting thing about this store is the terms for developers - almost the same as Apple's store.
$99/Year (I think that's being waved for now)
You can choose to have apps have a DRM wrapper (of Amazons design)
Amazon gets 30% of sales
I think potentially this could become THE app store for Android, because it will be probably about as carefully maintained as Apple's App store. No way is Amazon going to let through some things like blatant copyright infringement apps that get into the Android store today. As a result the apps to be found there should be of a generally higher level of quality.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I tried to use their mp3 store while I lived in New Zealand, and it was not at all obvious that the reason that buying mp3s were failing was because you were in a country it didn't support. Their was (and still is, since the nexus one is still sold there, and the mp3 store is tied to it) a fair few angry people on the forums. I doubt they will get very far outside of the US (and maybe the UK) with it.
They may of course not care.
Not true.
I have been using Apps first on my Palm and then Palm phone for many many years. We just called them Programs.
I hope you get Slashdotted...
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
There were NO APPS!
I guess you've never heard of Symbian, then.
Infinite time means everything that can happen, will. You being you is absolutely incidental. You do not exist.
but the store didn't have a glass window at the front.
And it didn't have a street (web) address as visible as "going to the app store to pick up a GPS and an SQL app, for under $x.xx."
Now it does.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
It's easy enough to share/sell an application on Google's Android App store...
Not if you're targeting Wi-Fi tablets and media players that run Android. For example, Archos 43 is supposed to be the Android counterpart to the iPod touch but doesn't have Android Market because it lacks 3G data, which as I understand it would have doubled the price of the device. (Compare the $250 Archos 43 to a $500 unlocked phone.) Is Amazon Appstore expected to work on these?
I guess you've never heard of Symbian, then.
Most cell phone customers in the United States have likewise never heard of Symbian. In this market, "smartphone" means BlackBerry, iPhone, or Android. Nokia has far less market share here than in the European Union market, and "Symbian" is confused with a sex toy.
Now, what are the chances Average Joe will use two Market apps rather than get into the habit of just using one?
What are the chances Average Joe will shop at both Sears and JCPenney rather than get into the habit of just using one? Or Walmart and Kmart/Target/Meijer/whatever else? Or Best Buy and... oh wait, its close competitor went out of business and sold its name to an e-tailer. Here's another one: Newegg and Monoprice. A variety of stores complement one another.
"Need I remind you of what the state of the market was before Apple introduced the iPhone?
Considering the iPhone was introduced (January 2007) more than a year and a half before Android (October 2008), the state of the Android Market was obviously "nonexistent," so it's not surprising there were "NO APPS!"
Your point was...that competition from the iPhone invigorated stagnant Android application development???
Or, maybe, you're referring to the overall marketplace for PDA-type device apps, and conveniently ignoring Palm, RIM, and WinMo, even Newton, for which there were plenty of apps, especially when one considers the lower available bandwidth and higher data transport costs at the time. Even if you restrict it to smartphones, Palm, RIM and WinMo were out with available apps when there were NO APPS for the iPhone (i.e. before it was released).
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
The multiple app store shenanigans are going to be the hardest thing for Android to overcome if google wants to take a serious bite out of apple. The iPads success isn't hardware as much as it is standardization. Of course google non-support for tablets is the reason...but google enabled the situation to get out of hand. Hopefully honeycomb will fix that.
I'm an Android app developer, and under the terms Amazon's currently offering, there's no way in hell I'll put my app there. There are three very serious problems with it. First, Amazon controls the pricing, not the developer - they can use your app as a loss leader. Second, they require that you give them your app and each update 14 days before you publish it anywhere else (such as on the Android Market) for their review process. That means no emergency fixes, and delayed releases, even if you're mainly publishing on the Android Market and want to put it on Amazon too. And third, it's competing with Android Market, which is preinstalled everywhere, with no users. It would be one thing if they offered more than Android Market's 70% take, but there're simply no advantages to it whatsoever.
Maybe they'll change their terms, and I'll reconsider. But the terms they're offering now are simply a bad deal for developers, and I doubt many will bite.
Also I have heard that Apple mainly checks for "objectionable content" (and still lets the "baby shaker" through - no idea how Google deals with such apps), not for whether the app runs stable.
That is not at all true, I've been involved with developing over a dozen iOS applications at this point. ANY crash means you do not get accepted, period, until you fix the crash. And we're not just talking crash on launch, we've seen multiple cases where they find a crash deep in the app somewhere after they have been using it for a while. I've seen apple testers posting stuff from an application and otherwise exercising components that registered on a server the application worked with.
As I said I don't think it's possible to do a deep security review but Apple is very carefully making sure an app will run without crashing over a reasonable period of use.
The other thing I've seen get apps sent back for fixing, is UI issues - for instance some part of the screen goes blank, or (in one app I worked on) the screen became a jumble of UI elements when rotated. That also will get you sent back.
Apple also carefully reads through your description of what the application will do, and makes sure it does AT LEAST that. One guy I know had an app rejected because the description said it used the image of a penny somewhere and it was really some other coin! Once he corrected the text of the description to be accurate he re-submitted and was accepted.
Basically Apple is doing a ton of checking over apps to at least make sure they are stable and are what users will expect when they buy. That's the best anyone can do really, I hope the Amazon store is the same way for Android apps because they really need someone to help developers clean up the apps a bit.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Stores and websites, sure. But most people are resistant to learning multiple systems on electronic devices.
What's the line between "stores" and "systems"? For example, buying on Amazon, buying on eBay, and buying from an independent e-tailer all have different checkout procedures.
as if microsoft wasn't dead in the water with mobile stuff already...
all while i'm rooting my brand new, off contract Tmobile HTC G2's. sweet. stick to what you once knew how to buy M$, and enjoy the ease of profit.
What's the line between "stores" and "systems"? For example, buying on Amazon, buying on eBay, and buying from an independent e-tailer all have different checkout procedures.
That's true, and why people fall into using one of them far more often than others, only turning to other stores when they can't find what they want at the usual place.
In the real world, most people end up shopping for food at one place.
In the same way once an app store is decent most people would stick with that and not really look around. That's why most people do not care Apple has one official app store, because it works pretty well. The few that do need some things not found there have Cydia, and that works pretty well also.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
are you nuts? there were millions of apps before istore was even thought of. only those apps were called software, or programs.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
Before the iPhone, there wasn't a consistent UI and putting everything behind a glass front and having a phone OS mediate everything, (rather than letting the application control the device.)
That means you were either a professional developer blessed in having contact to the OS developers, who were much less imaginative than the Apple staff, or you were a user playing Tetris on the phone.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
the "pipeline" to nowhere and get your product out to a store who might give you proper shelf placement, but that costs more.
Marketing a software product is a tough and expensive process which you must master, far beyond writing an app.
All of the software I have developed, since 1976, was used by enterprises and governments and was very, very expensive (as was I,) but development was a drop in the bucket compared to the "externalities."
Apps developed for multi-platform OSs for internet delivery get rid of "production, packaging, shipping, marketing (but not advertising, PR and promotion,) handling of recall/unsold product, A/R, and instead use the internet to cut costs by orders of magnitude.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Smartphone apps before iPhone were pretty much like computer apps before the IBM PC. They existed, but most people didn't know anyone who'd got one.
The jump of the significance of smartphone apps from an obscure niche to something that's casually mentioned on prime time chat shows, and is in use by masses of people on any train or plane you get on. It's been incredible to witness. I can't think of any other market that's grown so suddenly after such a long period of obscurity. Closest would be song downloads after the iPod launch.
Millions? No. In the low thousands, considering all smartphones and PDAs added together. And they were called applications or apps back then too.
(I used to be a Symbian OS developer in the days before iPhone, so I remember well.)
Heck there probably aren't a million mobile apps available now. iTunes is by far the largest vendor, and they have around 350,000 at the last count.
figure of speech.
millions==lots
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
amazon should build first confidence and allow wikileaks to express itself.
And I got it free on a contract, so it's not really clear how much it "cost".
It cost the difference between a phone plan including a subsidy and one not including a subsidy. Given the $20 per month price difference between T-Mobile's Even More Plus plan (bring your own phone or buy one from T-Mobile up front) and its 24-month Even More plan (choose your subsidized phone), I'm assuming this to be $480.
You sure about that ...?
For one thing, it's only been two weeks. For another, is this authorized by Google, or is it an infringing copy of the Market application? And is Google likely to block Market access from this app?
You certainly don't need a 3g connection to use the market app if you've got wifi!
Please see my reply to slim.
I don't see the problem, myself. If I prefer the Google store, I'll use the Google store. If I prefer the Amazon store, I'll use the Amazon store. You might also find features on the Amazon store (like buying an application as a gift for someone else) that don't exist in the Google store.
Competition is a good thing.
What you say is fundamental. I have an iPhone and basically like Apple's store (I also have wrote iPhone applications in the past..niche stuff that doesn't sell all that much and honestly is OLD). However, if I had an Android I think there are many reasons why an Amazon store would be useful:
I love the sound of distortion in the morning -- webcommando
For me, the biggest problem with the market lies in the content. Google have gone to the opposite extreme of Apple, and let just any scammer put up their crappy apps, pretending to be other apps and rendering it virtually impossible to find the decent stuff. They need to exercise a little more control, or at least charge on a per-app basis at a rate that might discourage all the crud.
Or the old Palm OS
Or Windows Mobile
Or BlackBerry
It wasn't that long ago that our "app store" was located @ handango.com
I wish I was a neutron bomb, for once I could go off...
Just start the registration process and read all the small print. Do read it before accept it. Beware: If you accept you *must* *all* your applications within 14 days. The Amazon rules are very harsh indeed.
As a soon to be full-time mobile game developer, I had done some research into the Android platform and it turns out targeting version 2.1 and up is the way to go: http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-versions.html 12.6% are still running 1.6 and 1.7. Not only that 2.1 devices are much more capable with faster CPU and GPUs. In my case, I plan to make an engine that run OpenGL ES 2.0 only. Screw 1.1 and it's fixed function pipeline and its wimpy ARM 9 CPU's!