Amazon’s Appstore wasn’t even accessible to Australians until May last year, and it has always seemed like very much a secondary player to Google Play. However, two developments this week potentially make it a more interesting distribution platform for Android developers.
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The first is the much-hyped launch of the Amazon Fire phone, which will also make use of the App Store. Right now (and for the foreseeable future), this is a US-only product: it’s tied to AT&T and is tightly hooked into Amazon Prime, which makes it unlikely we’ll see it down under for a long while (if ever). Nonetheless, if the Fire phone is a success, then that will create a larger pool of Appstore users.
Secondly, BlackBerry has announced a partnership with Amazon to make Appstore apps accessible to BlackBerry 10 devices. Quite aside from BlackBerry’s shrinking market share, it’s going to be hard to take this one seriously until more details emerge when BlackBerry 10.3 is released later this year.
The ability to run Android apps has long been promoted as an advantage of BB10, but few developers have bothered to make the porting changes required. Amazon’s involvement might change that, and could also give developers a relatively simple path to porting apps to BB10 without needing significant resources.
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