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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).
I presume that you must use Amazon's lock screen, which means no third-party ones. $50 off the purchase of two phones in exchange for no longer being able to use the lockscreen of my choice and having ads on it?
I simply don't see the value proposition there.
What a fucking nightmare!
I wouldn't do this even if it made the phone completely free.
What stops me from buying the reduced price phone, and then installing cyanogenmod on it, and avoiding the ads? I'm sure there will other simpler methods for disabling the ads as well.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
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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"I simply don't see the value proposition there."
Amazon is part of the competition. Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, and others are all competing to see who can be most abusive.
My opinion, shared by others.
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.
When the Fire Phone was announced, I watched the presentation video live. I thought the tech was interesting. But then I began to notice something as they demoed more and more features of the phone.
Everything about the phone is designed to sell me something. Constantly. Always. In my face.
Hey, Amazon. Here's a free clue. From a customer who actually likes to purchase things through Amazon.
The reason I buy a smart phone and a tablet: TO IMPROVE MY QUALITY OF LIFE.
NOT to serve as your advertising billboard.
Here is a follow on problem that develops from that. Since I therefore use Android, not fire phone, since the purpose of a smartphone is to improve my life, I naturally have a number of video apps. Netflix. Hulu. HBO. PBS. Others. And . . . I have Prime Video with Starz.
BUT . . . in an anticompetitive move, Amazon won't put its video as an Android app in the Google Play store. So I can watch it on my Roku. But not on much else.
I also own a Chromecast. When Amazon introduced the Fire Stick, Amazon stopped selling Chromecasts. And since Amazon Video doesn't have an app on Android, it also doesn't work on Chromecast. This is a strong disincentive for me to pay for Amazon Prime video or Starz. Amazon: you've ruined my trust in order to try to sell me a Fire Stick that I don't need, don't want, and all the while, I am *already* a subscriber to Prime video and Starz. What a dumb move. Make me lose trust in your entire business in order to boost the Fire Stick? Really?
BTW, I hate monopolists or wannabe monopolists.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
In 1997ish Nielsen services paid me something like $30 a month to put spyware on my PC and watch what websites I browsed. I think I played along for about 2 years, but then their software wasn't compatible with the new browser I wanted to use, so I dropped them. Seemed like a fair trade, it was 99% unobtrusive and I really didn't care if they watched what I did on the computer.
Look, this phone isn't locked into shit. It's rootable. And from what I have read, you aren't even required a carrier or a plan when you buy it. I'm personally very tempted as I have a crappy dumb phone and honestly, this is a steal. But I'm a poor person and $50 is a lot of money. But I have no idea why the fuck most of you are bitching about being locked into Amazon when that isn't even true. Slashdot used to be about people who knew shit and understood that pretty much every cellphone released today is rootable. But I guess either all the old peeps are senile or their kids use their accounts now.
tl;dr shit is rootable, you aren't locked into anything.
Be seeing you...