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Amazon Prime Will Knock $50 Off an Android Phone If You Watch Amazon's Lock-Screen Ads (recode.net)
It's no secret that Amazon's Fire Phone tanked on the market. But while the e-commerce giant is keeping a distance from smartphone manufacturing business for some time, it is not ignoring the platform. The company is now willing to offer its Prime members a $50 discount on two unlocked phone models should they agree to see ads on the lock-screen of their smartphone. Recode reports:Unlike the Fire Phone, which used Amazon services in place of Google, these two phones (the fourth-generation Moto G and Blu R1 HD) will include all the standard Google apps (Play Store, YouTube, Gmail, Chrome, etc.) along with Amazon apps for shopping, watching video and playing music. With the discount, the Blu phone will sell for just $49, while the price of the Moto G drops to $149. The move is clearly a modest one but could at some point become more significant, particularly if Amazon is willing to strike deals with other hardware makers to include its apps and services.The bigger news is Amazon finding its way into Google Mobile Services-powered Android smartphones. Most of the Amazon-branded devices don't have Google Mobile Services (Google Play, Google Play Services, Gmail etc).
What a fucking nightmare!
I wouldn't do this even if it made the phone completely free.
With ads comes monitoring and analytics, not to mention browser fingerprinting. I'll pass.
I wish Amazon would offer the opposite. Pay a bit more, get a phone with up to date specs, a MicroSD card, two SIM card slots, with the bootloader unlockable with fastboot oem unlock, like the Nexus series, and certified builds of CyanogenMod, and bloatware free ROMs, with source code for all SoC drivers available.
Locked bootloader.
This is the right way to integrate advertisement.
1. Let the user know before the sale
2. Offer an incentive to compensate for the bandwidth/convenience/intrusion
3. Allow the same equipment to be bought with or without the advertising
While I would never buy in personally, I believe this is the first attempt to treat customers fairly when it comes to advertising and data collection.
You should also be able to disable the advertisements after the traditional subsidy period has ended---so 2 years for mobile.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
Remember when grocery stores in the U.S. first starting giving "discounts" if you used your loyalty card, or whatever it was called at the time, that allowed them to track your purchases? Now they just raise the prices on select items far above the price of their competitors, then only sell it to you for the normal price if you hand over your personal data. The same thing will eventually happen with phones.
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Because I routinely buy stuff from Amazon. As an Amazon customer, this offer makes no sense.
To you. To others, however (you realize this isn't creimer.com but slashdot.org) it might. Not looking for either of those phones presently (a little on the low end for me), but I've spent years with ads on my Kindle lock screen, which saved me maybe all of $20 on a Kindle purchase. Never bothered me once, and even bought a couple of things when they were good deals. Discovered a good book to read, and got a great deal on a SanDisk SSD that was advertised with special pricing for Kindle with Ads customers. Personally, I've never used a third party lock screen, nor do I use the lock screen all that much, so yeah, I would consider it if the phone was right.
That is something they'll never do. All of their hardware exists only to channel users to their website.