Amazon Appstore sees accelerated growth

Amazon’s Appstore selection has nearly tripled in the past year and developers continue to report strong monetization from the apps they offer in the store.



The Amazon Appstore now has more than 240,000 apps and games, and is available in nearly 200 countries and on a multitude of devices. Additionally, Amazon Coins have become widely popular, according to the online giant — customers have spent hundreds of millions of Amazon Coins on apps, games and in-app items, it said.



The number of new developers joining the Amazon Appstore per month close to doubled in the last year.



“Developers tell us that they experience improved reach, greater monetization, and, oftentimes, higher revenue when they have their apps and games in the Amazon Appstore,” said Mike George, VP of Amazon Appstore and Games. “But this is just the beginning — we’re building more services and capabilities for developers and more Android-based APIs based on their feedback. Most Android apps just work on Kindle Fire, and with an Appstore made for Android devices, Amazon’s Appstore can help developers distribute their apps on Android devices all over the world. It’s a great time for developers to bring their apps to the Amazon Appstore.”



Amazon Appstore includes an array of services that position the company as a complete end-to-end ecosystem for developers building, monetizing and marketing their apps and games for customers. These capabilities include:

• The ability for app developers to use Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) technology platform for their infrastructure needs. Building blocks such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon DynamoDB allow developers to focus on what differentiates their app rather than the undifferentiated heavy lifting of infrastructure.


• Amazon SNS Mobile Push enables developers to easily send push notifications to Apple, Google and Kindle Fire devices using one simple API, and easily scale from a few notifications a day to hundreds of millions of notifications per day or higher.


• Login with Amazon, which allows developers to reduce sign-in friction for their customers by conveniently letting them login in with their Amazon, Facebook or Google identities, leading to higher engagement and order conversion.


• In-App Purchasing on Kindle Fire, Android, Mac, PC and web-based games. This enables developers to offer their digital items in apps and games while allowing end users to use their Amazon accounts to make the purchase.


• Mobile Associates API for Kindle Fire and other Android devices. This enables developers to merchandise millions of physical and digital items from Amazon.com within their apps and games.


• Mobile Ads, which helps developers monetize their apps by displaying high quality, relevant display ads from brand advertisers, including Amazon.


• GameCircle, which includes capabilities like Achievements, Leaderboards, Friends and Whispersync for syncing games across Android and Fire OS, and leads to better engagement with games.


• A/B Testing and Analytics, which helps developers across iOS, Android and FireOS track user engagement metrics or test different in-app experiences across iOS, Android, and Fire OS, giving developers the tools they need to increase user engagement and monetization.