Perhaps lost amidst the release of the new Fire TV, Amazon also announced that its app store has surpassed the 200,000 apps mark. The Amazon AppStore has shown significant growth since its inception just over 3 years ago. In fact, just last August the app store reached 100,000 apps; meaning that it has doubled in size in less than a year. Of course, this still pales in comparison to the Google Play and Apple App Store which both have over 1 million apps. However, Amazon is clearly becoming a larger player in the app market that developers must pay attention to.
While Amazon is certainly pleased with the overall number of apps available in the store, the company is also making a push to improve quality as well. Amazon’s AppStore Developer Select offers developers incentives for optimizing their applications specifically for Amazon devices. The benefits include preferred placement within the app store and 500,000 ad impressions. To qualify, developers must make sure their app runs in HD, taking up the entire screen, and use Amazon’s own API.
This program serves as a great reminder for developers that they must optimize their apps across a wide spectrum of devices. For Amazon specific apps, this means taking into account Amazon’s own Fire OS, several generations of Kindle tablets from the new Fire HDX to older devices, and different screen sizes including 7 and 8.9 inch models. Add this on top of Apple and other Android devices and you are looking at a diverse range of devices that need to be taken into consideration when testing.