Last Wednesday we covered a rumor that said Amazon was going to launch their App Store in Europe later this year. Today that’s now been confirmed by Amazon themselves. Developers from the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain can start submitting applications starting right now, with the actual Amazon App Store launching “later this summer”. We wish we could give you an exact date, but sadly that wasn’t provided.
So what is Amazon’s App Store? Think of it like the Google Play Store, except Amazon is hosting the stuff that’s inside instead of Google. Why was it created? Because the Google Play Store is filled to the brim with malware, broken apps, and it’s incredibly difficult to find genuinely useful applications. Amazon “curates”, a fancy way of saying hand picks, which apps they’re going to sell to their customers. In America it’s said to be a hit, though Amazon isn’t giving us any numbers to compare and contrast. Take their enthusiasm with a grain of salt.
Discovery is a word you’ve probably heard a few times this year. In a nutshell, there’s so much stuff out there for people to buy, whether it be apps, music, movies, or games, that it’s becoming damn near impossible to find out what’s good and what’s not. Apple is looking to solve this problem by having “Editors Choice” apps and a free app of the week. Nokia has the “Nokia Collection” on their Lumia handsets. With that in mind, Amazon isn’t as crazy as originally thought they were when they initially revealed their own store for Android devices.
Make no mistake, this problem is only going to get worse. Google recently redesigned their app store, when iOS 6 launches later this year it’ll also have a newly designed app store, and we’ll probably see even more redesigns over the coming years as companies find new and interesting ways of displaying relevant content.