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Android Phone Tips

Android Phone Tips
The Amazon Appstore, which was unveiled Tuesday, includes free and paid apps from Android software developers. Since 2008, a slew of Android-running phones and tablets running Android have been released, and Google's own Android Market app store, which is available on these devices and online, now offers more than 150,000 apps.

Available apps will conform to Amazon's general content rules, which means the Appstore will, for example, exclude apps that include pornographic content. The Appstore is available online at Amazon.com/appstore, and a mobile version is available for download at the same Web address. Aside from competition from Google and other purveyors of Android apps, Amazon is facing another challenge.

Apple Inc. filed a lawsuit Friday contesting Amazon's use of the term "App Store," which is the name that Apple uses for its online store for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. Amazon has officially launched its own application store for the Android mobile operating system. Its store interface, which is available today, allows users to purchase third-party programs with through their Amazon account. 

You have to download the Appstore apk from Amazon and manually sideload it onto your device. Although the average Android enthusiast will have no difficulty sideloading the Amazon Appstore, it's not going to be an easy process for regular end users. Once you get the Appstore installed, the setup process is relatively painless—it just asks you for your Amazon login credentials the first time that it runs. 

When you buy paid applications from the AmazonAppstore, it will bill your Amazon account. There are also a few things that Amazon does better than Google. The search feature in Amazon's store is actually useful when it loads (Google apparently hasn't brought its pigeon-ranking innovations over to the Android Market yet) and it uses Amazon's nifty product recommendation algorithms to suggest applications that it thinks a user might like.

It can't tell which applications you have already installed on our device from the Android Market, and it can't perform application installations in the background. For regular end users who have a conventional Android device, the Appstore is a bit of a pain. Amazon is also making one commercial application available for free every day. As we will discuss in a follow-up article, the real significance of the Amazon Appstore is its potential for disrupting Google's control over the Android ecosystem. 

Amazon's Android App Store offers a curated list of Android-based applications to users that are vetted before being made available to consumers. The appeal of the the Amazon Android App Store is that it supposedly elevates quality over quantity. Amazon's App Store is intended to address this problem. 

Amazon also looks set on driving down prices for apps with some reports suggesting that Amazon App Store applications will sell for less than their Android Marketplace versions. Ironically, Amazon may well be adding to the perceived fragmentation in the Android market. 

For some time now there has been concern that multiple versions of Android and multiple app market places - Amazon's and Google's stores are just two of many stores - make Android confusing for less savvy users, whereas Apple's tight control over iTunes and its app store makes iOS a more user-friendly experience. Undoubtedly the Amazon App Store will add to the fragmentation, especially if an app can be bought from Amazon or from the Android Marketplace for different prices. 
By. Android Phone Tips



Friday, March 25, 2011 | 0 comments | Labels: ,

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