U.S. based e-commerce leader Amazon, announced on Thursday, December 6 that, “[a]pp downloads in the Appstore have grown more than 500 percent over the previous year.” The 5 fold increase has been driven by two major factors. The first is the introduction of Amazon’s own devices in the form of th eKindle Fire tablet lineup started September 2011. The second is developers getting a lot of support from the company in creating Android apps for Amazon’s devices.
Amazon Appstore for Android mobile apps has been open since March 2011. It seems likely that most of the downloads at the site are coming from Amazon devices and not other Android smartphones or tablets. Android powered devices usually don’t come with the Amazon Appstore pre-installed so not many people are going to be discovering through their phone. Furthermore, Google pushes its own Google Play store on Android devices and Amazon may not have a very good chance of winning too many people over with its own store. Interestingly, Google Play cannot be installed at all on Amazon’s Kindle Fire or Kindle Fire HD tablets.
The Amazon Appstore has also been giving developers a lot of help in getting their apps onto their store. Recently the company launched A/B testing and said, “With A/B Testing, developers can test simultaneous treatments of their apps, receive data about what’s worked best, and quickly adjust their apps to take advantage of this customer learning. A/B Testing is the latest developer service that Amazon has launched (along with Achievements, Leaderboards, Whispersync across devices, In-App Purchasing, and 1-Click Purchasing) that make it simpler than ever for app developers to concentrate on the differentiating parts of their apps rather than the undifferentiated infrastructure and engagement components.”
This new feature will join many other features like GameCircle, Maps API, Test Drive, localization support, and Kindle Fire emulator. This should help developer’s port apps from other platforms and also create new ones for the Amazon ecosystem.
Source: GigaOM
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