Amazon this week launched their own competing app store for Android. With only a fraction of the catalog that the official Android Market has, it is still off to a strong start. Various promotions and free paid apps of the day are being used to lure people to put forth the effort to install the Amazon App Store itself. This is bad news for the longevity of the platform.
Let's be honest, greed is the elemental focus that is driving Amazon's motives. They see the money being left on the table and being the huge superstore they are, expansion into mobile apps is good from a business sense but ultimately the death knell for Android as a leading platform. Android is already suffering from the latest industry buzzword: fragmentation, whether real or perceived, the mobile OS surely doesn't need any more.
The problem isn't so much at present but fast forward a year and now, thanks to Amazon paving the way, we have app stores from Target, Wal-mart, buy.com, Facebook, Walgreens? What a mess! Why put the burden of app management for updates on the user? Each store will undoubtedly have their own update mechanisms and each store will certainly not have identical app catalogs meaning the user is always in question to which store has the app they want. Don't forget the versioning problem either, you may be running an out of date app due to which store you bought it from thanks to approval processes. App fragmentation now? Imagine the incompatibilities that could arise from such a system. The seeds of that system have been planted this week.
I reiterate: why is this added complexity being pushed to users? A central repository for apps and updates is easy to manage and to communicate. For the sake of money this idea is fading.
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