It’s been many months in the making, but today Amazon have finally taken the wraps off their Appstore for Android sporting a modest 3,800 Apps, including an exclusive version of Angry Birds that will no doubt help drive uptake of the new platform.
Currently only available to US customers, the Appstore has already caught the attention of Apple, who have sued the online retail giant for copyright infringement over use of the term “App Store” – Amazon were clearly hoping truncating the term would avoid such troubles.
Amazon are hoping to offer an “iTunes for Android”, meaning that they are hoping their closed, curated store will attract a higher quality of App and therefore greater profitability that the vanilla Android Market, which has been plagued by piracy and poor paid-app performance since launch, as well as recently being shown up following the discovery of a number of malicious apps.
Amazon will most likely be hoping to offer their Appstore to low-end Android devices that come without Google’s blessings, and the GMail, Maps and Market access that entails. Currently the barrier to entry is fairly high – Google have banned competing app distribution platforms from the official Android Market, meaning potential users of the new Amazon store have to download and manually install the raw .apk file – an option not currently available to AT&T customers due to restrictions the carrier places on app installations.
The initial offering of apps is modest, but seemingly high quality. The biggest draw will be Angry Birds Rio, which is exclusive to the Amazon Appstore for an unspecified period – and free for the first 24 hours, after which it will cost $0.99. The other Angry Birds games are also available for the same price, presumably ad-free.
Amazon are offering in-browser try-before-you-buy functionality for their new store, meaning you can test drive apps before you purchase them.
