The Amazon Appstore for Android devices will be discontinued on August 20, 2025
amazon.com
amazon.com
"Starting August 20, 2025, any apps downloaded from the Amazon Appstore will not be guaranteed to operate on Android devices. Amazon Appstore will continue to be available elsewhere, including on Fire TV and Fire Tablet devices. " ---------
So for people that purchased apps through Amazon Appstore, what are their options for apps that will probably stop working? If there are no options for a refund, then this is another reason not to purchase items that you never truly own.
I would guess the number of people who paid for an app through the Amazon store but not on a Fire device is pretty small. And do you ever really own an app? I have so few that I paid a one time payment for.
They wanted android developers that used google play services to basically be able to submit the same app to the amazon/fire store (without major revisions), so they reverse engineered the framework used by Google for api/hooks between the apps/apks and the "play-services"/OS levels.
Sort of spoofed the environment to prioritize compatibility in order to make it as easy as possible to grow the Amazon app store.
People don't realize that despite Android being nominally 'Open Source', the closed source Google layer on most phones makes it very difficult to exclude Google entirely from the picture and have a user friendly phone environment (both end-user and app-developer/playstore-user).
Basically only Amazon and China had resources to counter it directly with Android, or you could drop that layer and go the less user friendly route of st like AOSP 'pure' phones.
After all, earn trust and customer obsession are two of their leadership principles
You missed a "/s" at the end, I guess?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
[0a] awesome there is a Wikipedia page for enshittification; it even has a section specific to Amazon
I quit recently. I couldn't trust anyone to act in good faith. My days were getting worse. Stress at all time high. It comes down from the top aka Jassy and Bezos.
Edited per requests
I assume there is already something in the EULA covering their asses. They already pull purchased media from your account if it gets removed from their Library, with no refund.
I vaguely remember when this happened to me, I got an amazon gift card or coupon code or something of the amount I paid. I'm not saying they will do the same in this instance, but maybe?
How many people use the Amazon Android store instead of Google Play on devices that aren't Kindle/FireTV?
It also lacks a dozen side services I don’t use. If you’re all in on Amazon Music, that’d be a con.
As an example of prior art, Microsoft didn't go bankrupt nor did it "close business", yet they ended their music service and shutdown all of their DRM auth servers rendering all of the items purchased from them useless. This is the same thing.
Wiping out customers' purchases when you've got $100 billion in the bank, though? Kinda a dick move.
What you call a dick move might actually have made sense financially for a business. If MS Music was losing money with no hopes of ever turning a profit, why should they continue to operate a charity music service subsidized by all of the other MS businesses that are making money?
Same thing for Amazon. If it is something that shows no signs of paying for itself, why continue to operate it? You have to stop the bleeding at some point. What was the attraction to a dev to use Amazon over Google? Lower percentage of the take? Maybe that explains why it was a money loser?
At the end of the day, it was a bet on a losing horse.
Of course it makes financial sense for the business. Taking the customer's money and not delivering the promised product is really profitable, if you can get away with it.
Still a dick move though.
Microsoft could make a deal with, say, Apple. They check each Microsoft Music (Xbox Music? Zune Music?) account for total spend, and give people an iTunes gift card for nearest total amount. Negotiate a bulk pricing deal with Apple.
Microsoft gets to look good, Apple gets to look good. But it'd cost 0.001% of total Microsoft profit and the shareholders can't have that.
Compare that to some other businesses that will happily recommend you to a competitor if it is a better fit, or if they shut down go out of their way to write a tool or help you with off- and onboarding to an alternative.
When Google shut down Stadia they refunded all purchases - both games and hardware.
Last year I read the book Julia by Sandra Newman, which shows the story of 1984 from Winston's lover's perspective. Spoiler, at the very end of the book, Julia escapes Airstrip One, and we find out that Big Brother has just been captured by the good guys, and he is now a decrepit old man with no understanding of the world.
This implies that all the suffering, hardship, and pain experienced in the dystopian classic happens for no reason at all. Airstrip One is just a machine that gnashes and grinds each individual person within it and outputs... nothing.
This is the closest any book has gotten to describing my Amazon experience. I read headlines like this and wonder how long the machine continue to run for.
1: https://hackaday.com/2021/08/02/home-depot-is-selling-power-...
apparently they haven't seen proof that this is a thing inside the tools (per that article at least) but if i was tasked with this i'd use programmable fuses on the mCU. Battery pack in, hit the trigger twice or something, put it on the activation thing, the mCU nukes the "deactivated" fuses, and it will permanently be enabled.
what do you want to bet it isn't that? btw it could be, i just thought of the first thing that would guarantee the purchaser always had their tool that they had purchased. anything that requires some mechanical linkage to move (a relay was mentioned) will break the first time you drop the tool on its nuts.
Also if your phone breaks on a job you get to go home because "none of my tools work anymore, sorry"
edit: it took me a minute but the theft numbers are like 0.8% and i bet most places would love to have shrink that low.
as a comparison 17% of minimum wage earners have experienced losses averaging a quarter of their gross paychecks. All theft except wage theft in the US (larceny, grand, robbery, fraud) is ~35% of just the recovered wages (in 2012 i am looking at).
0.8% shrink, lol
[0] i got my data from https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-fo... for this post but i knew what to look for because there was a nice graphic showing the ratios of all theft and wage theft is easily 3x as large as the rest i saw a year or two ago.
>principles
when "good will" means spending other people's money, it's pretty easy, i guess? something infrastructure development something
What are some well-known apps sold as one-time purchases now?
What I've heard is that one-time purchases lead to a lack of income after three years, when people expect upgrades. That's not a problem for app developers who don't plan to do any upgrades, of course.
Notably I'll throw in a few things like PocketCasts, Nova Launcher, Gentle Alarm by Mobitobi, a variety of camera and gallery apps. Some of those shifted to subscriptions (PocketCasts after being sold twice), others just got shuttered.
i'm not in the habit of buying apps anymore. I did drop a lot of money on the wolfram alpha iOS app when it first launched (it was over $50 at the time iirc, but to hedge i'll say "adjusted for inflation")
It's nothing special, just a location tracker that logs to a file every so often based on time and/or distance moved (could also ping a URL with encoded location info instead). Basically the underlying data for location history without relying on Google. Its notable feature years ago was that it would do location 'steals' - instead of just triggering a then-expensive location check, it would grab the most current available location info as triggered by some other application and only force an update if that information was too old.
Don't make excuses for Amazon, please.
I suppose I could analyze that data, although I can't think of an actual good reason to do so. I have no idea whether those records are real or fabricated. So no real way to verify that google is paying me the correct amount. Since you asked.
It was an idle curiosity. If i ever make an app, it'll have a trivial authenticated hosted back end, just to keep google honest!
It seems like it would be trivial for a user to login to the app acquired from a different store to be able to display a "welcome back" or even something along the lines of a "restore purchases" type of thing.
This can't be reinventing the wheel kind of a thing.
The only way a developer would know a person is an existing user is if they have a user sign up process inside the app itself.
It is doable, the main issues is: 1. Getting users to redownload the app from the Play store 2. Maintaining this registration transfer mechanism
Shattered Pixel Dungeon was a good example of me paying on one platform, and then applying the upgrade to the free app after downloading on another.
This isn't any different from a user switching to a new device and having to download apps again. Not everyone restores from backup and prefers clean installs. Downloading an app again should not be the point of friction
Renting, however, does not work that way. Any DRM-protected download is a rental. Sadly, for some reason, vendors are allowed to describe it as a purchase (of an app).
I don’t know why you are giving up.
There's no guarantee you'll be able to easily use an ebook in today's formats 50 years from now.
Same for applications.
You're really that confident in 50 years you'll be able to easily run x86 applications written for Windows or Mac?
You don't need binary compatibility. You can load a gif on any computer today, and it's old. I can view aiff image files from my Amiga still.
We're already 50 years in on many formats.
Where it becomes uncertain, it DRM laden, closed source applications with bespoke file formats.
How many image formats CAN'T you read today that you could read 50 years ago?
2) Images are much much much more ubiquitous than book formats
I would bet that the vast majority if not all image formats that can't be read anymore are due to their spec never being published.
GIF, JPEG, MP3... these are all patented technologies whose patents have expired into the public domain. That they're still used and useful today is a very strong indication that they'll be available in another 50 years. I think that having public patents for image and audio formats helps to demonstrate that it's more than just survivorship bias.
I don’t know. How many?
That supports 200 image file formats as inputs, and you can then export it to PNG or GIF or BMP.
Your question, on its face, seems ok, but really, there's probably millions of image file formats lost to the sands of time. Shareware image creation programs, tiny fly-by-nite company's software that only ever had one major release (probably some cad formats in there. Those were where i used to always have problems 22 years ago when i did this for work.)
however, at least 200 of them are preserved through that "company's" dedication to this topic.
I have no idea what “easily” means here, but I’m not unique. While these open-format ebooks remain of interest to even a small community, they will remain readable and convertable.
What makes you doubt that?
> You're really that confident in 50 years you'll be able to easily run x86 applications written for Windows or Mac?
Again, I have no idea what “easily” means here. However, my use of “proper” also wasn’t clear (I edited it down from “free software”).
“Proper” certainly implies that their runnability does not depend on the wall clock, or availability of an internet service. Yes, I am confident that I can run such programs in the future, on appropriate hardware.
(Note how the thread is about digital, not physical, things.)
Computer games have a similar problem. There is an EU petition specifically for computer games to stop such practice:
https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home
We need a petition like this for all software.
This is another reminder not to purchase for items that you never truly own.
Of course, Amazon are subject to the DMA and (I suspect) not overall a fan, so maybe it makes sense for them to not make use of the capabilities it allows?
https://slack.com/blog/news/slack-aws-drive-development-agil...
Unofficially, this agreement happened at the same time Amazon started using slack internally
> Note: This does not impact the availability of the Amazon Chime SDK service.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/update-...
Hopefully they just adopt Zoom and not something even more obscure.
Early in the pandemic I had to use many different systems as an academic, when lots of different contacts pivoted online in different ways. Chime was the least of my problems; it just worked when many other systems struggled.
I liked the Chime meeting/calendar integration at Amazon that could ring everyone at the start of the meeting, meaning that most meetings started promptly.
When they did decide to kill something, like non-VPC EC2, you'd get the notice a literal decade ahead. For this specific example, sunset started end of '13, with the last instance shut off mid '23.
This all started to change a couple of years ago, when they became much more aggressive with doing the Googles and just killing a thing with a few months of a warning. Pity.
Now there appears to be no option left.
I do see potential for a closed source repo managed like an app store, but adding a repo for every app adds unnecessary security risks (as the app specific repo can contain any number of apps).
Could you speak more to your security concerns about adding repos? To the very best of my knowledge it doesn't auto-download from all the repos, that would be crazy, and it for sure doesn't auto-install from them
Nothing gets auto downloaded, but all of the sudden you need to be very wary of what apps you download from what repos, and that kind of threat fatigue will lead to infections for even the most diligent users.
That's not to say I think the concept of adding repos is bad, the unfortunate truth is just that adding repos comes with a bunch of implications that many users are likely to be unprepared for. It downgrades F-Droid from "a project with centralized management that tries its best to remove malicious apps" to "downloading APK files from random websites (now with auto update)".
Most app available on Amazon's app store are already available via Google Play Store anyways. Rather, most developers have deserted the Amazon's store and the versions available there are outdated by years. I noted that Apps Amazon released for their own external or internal events like AWS re:Invent were only available via Google's Play Store and not Amazon's own.
The challenge is that many apps on Amazon's app store are tied to the app store. I once tried disabling Amazon's app store app, and noted that the apps installed stopped working (until the app store was enabled again). My immediate conclusion was that I would not want to rely on these apps or Amazon's app store. The developers may not have any incentive to update their apps versions on Amazon's store to remove the dependence on the latter, and nor they may have any to allow the paid users just install those apps from Google's play store without paying afresh.
(To be fair, it's possible to program missions on the web and synchronize the account with the app to send the missions on the device; but having no map at all on the device is still a big problem.)
I was initially confused because I thought they were just pushing a mobile access pathway for the normal Epic store, and I had no interest in that, but Bloons TD 6 is pretty fun, so I was willing to give it a shot to see what they'll give away next month https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/mobile#:~:text=Free%20Give...
It is likely that Microsoft's decision lead to this.
Mind you, I had to sideload it for both of them.
FireOS devices aren't certified by Google and so, they do not come with "Gapps" (including the Play Store) preinstalled. Even if they were, Amazon might have some reservations about preinstalling Gapps (which run with higher than normal privileges), effectively letting Google get hands on its user's purchasing habits.
All that to say, this is a business limitation not a technical one.
See also: Google's iron grip on Android: Controlling open source by any means necessary, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6582494 (2014).
https://www.howtogeek.com/232726/how-to-install-the-google-p...
If I needed a tablet for anything serious, I'd buy an iPad or Pixel Tablet, both of which come with a real app store.
Done. Mostly.
I dropped Prime last year, and have been surprised by the results.
1. I don't buy a bunch of pointless plastic crap that I don't need anymore. It was the thrill/affirmation/addiction of near-instant gratification delivery that made me buy stuff on impulse.
2. I've saved a bunch of money because of #1.
3. Unless it's same-day delivery, "Prime" delivery is meaningless. Even with Prime, about 80% of my same-day, next-day or second-day deliveries were delayed. A couple of times for a week or more. I can't count the number of times the Amazon.com delivery tracker told me "You're next!" with a little cartoon truck on a map next to my home. Then an hour later, "We're doing a few more deliveries first." And then "Delivery date unknown."
I do still occasionally buy from Amazon, when there's something I can't get locally. But without the instant gratification, I buy much less. And sometimes the things I do buy arrive with the same speed of Prime delivery anyway.
They literally sell only 4 cards.
AWS is everywhere, but Amazon Retail is a separate entity and would definitely feel the crunch of even 30% of its users deciding to shop elsewhere or cancelling Prime.
(I cancelled my Prime membership a year and a half ago and do almost all of my shopping directly from manufacturers or from smaller stores. I spent thousands of dollars per year with them.
I used Walmart Lists to replace my Amazon subscribe and save purchases for a year but was finally able to, mostly, move off of that earlier this year. As it happens, HEB, a grocery chain in Texas, has just about everything I need!
I resisted doing this earlier because I thought I needed one/two-day delivery; I wrote posts on here defending this "need." It turns out that, no, I can wait a few days, and, yes, UPS, USPS, and FedEx are significantly more reliable than Amazon Flex.)
On petroleum, my main beef is not the chemical but how most behemoths managing the market are screwing with our health and the planet. There is an alternate world where BP is not a bunch of psychopaths and we have stronger environmental regulations.
In that respect, getting electricty from BP instead of oil from BP isn't that much of a difference in my book, I don't believe they manage their solar farm better than their oil tankers.
That's the lens I see for Amazon: if we're pissed at them because they killed their App store, does keeping AWS customers afloat really help on the moral standpoint ?
I know we can't stick on principle on everything, I just see the very point of the boycott to be very blurry and not reaching it's target.
I thought losing two day shipping would suck, but it really hasn't. Most of the big retailers (in my area anyways) end up delivering online orders in two days or less anyways, and the delivery fee is free if your order is over a certain size (usually around $35)
De-googling or De-appleing is hard, but De-amazoning (at least for me) was trivial and anticlimactic.
If we go literal with this, it gets far more complicated counting Amazon web services
It's kinda relevant that these principles only apply to services that have the Amazon logo, and not where more than half of Amazon's profit is coming from.
Hypothetically you might be bringing more business to Amazon through any of their AWS customers than by buying your USB cables on the storefront.
PS: I don't have a good answer to this, but boycott and "vote with your wallet" kind of actions have became a very complex thing IMHO.
There used to be a bulk site I was on before COVID, but they were bought and shut down.
If that's the case, it's a bad idea, Amazon is not prepared to maintain their own OS.
Personally I still haven't gotten over Amazon's killing of the magazine subscription service.
I tried searching for it and found several outright scam apps. I figured Amazon had given up with it.