von According to a recent TechCrunch article, Amazon is building an Android app store. Although – as usual one might say – this still hasn’t been confirmed, the author is already able to provide some details, which are regarding royalties and signup fees for the respective developer programme.
In my opinion, this is interesting for a couple of reasons. First of all, it seems that Amazon continues its strategy of not only offering physical goods but successively adding digital products to its portfolio. The best example for this are the increasing ebook sales, the download of music files (Amazon MP3, which launched in the US about 3 years ago) and now applications for the Android platform.
Secondly, it raises the question what this kind of support for Android means for Amazon’s Kindle – even more so because, as rumours go, Amazon is also planning to build an Android tablet itself.
Thirdly, this piece of news ties in with a recent study which showed that most of the more than 2,000 software developers that have been asked favoured Android over iOS with regard to the future of app development. With yet another major player entering the Android universe (apparently, Verizon is also planning a similar service), the OS gains momentum but at the same time, this move leads to an even more fragmented Android world out there.
