"What happens to my apps after the discontinuation of the Amazon Appstore on Android?"
"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.
Amazon has become incredibly inhospitable. Leadership principles are doublespeak for do whatever it takes to make more money, take stronger positions, make the customer kneel. Did you know their returns can now take up to 90 days to receive a refund? It is just one of the many many ways.
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.
I had a very hard time working there, maybe the worst time in my life. I worked with a lot of very smart people, but something about the company culture is doomed in a way I haven't seen before.
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.
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'm sure you can take them to the small claims court, of course if you do that Amazon ban you from ever using any of their services. Given how many people rely on Amazon prime these days that's not a pleasant prospect.
Even if they did go bankrupt, it's ridiculous that apps bought through that store would suddenly stop working. The mobile software industry way too closely ties applications to these "stores." Imagine if Ace Hardware went out of business and then suddenly my drill and hammers disappeared or stopped working!
I'm surprised they're not just refunding all the purchases. I thought Amazon was still that kind of place. When they discontinued Amazon Cloud Cam in 2022, they sent out a replacement Blink camera for every Cloud Cam I had purchased, plus a year of free Blink service. This was 5 years after I had purchased the cameras, and they made no commitment to them working forever.
When you say isn't closing business, that's precisely what they are doing. Amazon is an umbrella company with many business operating underneath it. Their app store is just another vertical like AWS is separate from the retail site. If they choose to stop offering a service, that's their prerogative.
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.
Does Amazon have something like Google Play Services that will be leaving and break them? Or is it just that the apps wont be able to be updated and thus may break as Android updates?
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 jumped through some pretty giant hoops to make their play services "drop in" replacement, but idk if that's just for fire tablets or if it gets installed on Android too.
There are. Anything that is a file in an open format will outlive me (given minimal care in terms of backups). My family photos, my markdown notes, non-DRM music and ebooks, proper applications. I’d say it’s all digital things, except for a small enshittified sliver.
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).
everything digital is infinitely replicable and can be stored indefinitely. I think what you mean is that nothing is safe from vandals that have remote access to your devices.
Yeah, don't have high expectations for things you pay for but don't own. It's a sad truth, but I've accepted it (I also bought some dvds in 2024 which is something I never thought I'd do again).
Not sure about DVDs, but CDs weren't designed to last longer than 10 years. Most of my CD collection has physically rotted. Because I was using Windows Media Player and iTunes, I ripped most of collection in M4A format, which, at the time, was better than MP3. A couple of years ago, I decided that I wanted to re-rip my CD collection (some 200 odd CDs) in FLAC format instead of m4a format (don't ask). And some significant portion (50%?) of the new FLAC rips were missing tracks due to physical read errors on the original CD media.
If I want to spin up a CI/CD pipeline to build an Android app that takes 30 seconds. I send you or anyone else the link and you can test it out.
With Apple I need to beg for my dev account to be approved, pay 100$ a year, and submit it via test flight.
If more than X numbers of people use it , ohh no I have to publish it via the app store. If it pleases King Cook, may I publish a game for my friends to play.
Google is starting to restrict Android too, custom system roms aren't as popular anymore, but theirs still a sense it's my phone.
With Apple, it's still Apple's phone, you've just purchased a revokable license to use it in accordance with the terms you agreed to.
> It's bad enough that I've had at least a dozen apps disappear from my iDevices over the years because the companies running them went out of business, pivoted, exited, or otherwise disappeared or stopped supporting their product. The last thing I want is for an entire app store's worth of apps to suddenly go away.
This happens just the same on iOS when Apple drops support for a device. First-party stores are not a defense against this. It's theoretically easier to plan for, but you're still at the mercy of Apple's support window.
Once upon a time you could download an app and it would work indefinitely, but that's not the way any modern app-store based systems really work. What Amazon is doing here is probably less impactful than when Apple kills certain APIs and breaks a bunch of apps with an update. (I'm certain Amazon and Apple both do estimated math about the number of devices/apps/users they're breaking, and I'm also certain just based on volume that Amazon is breaking fewer people/apps with this change than Apple does routinely.)
It's my understanding that the majority of people who want alternative app stores for iOS don't necessarily want something like an Amazon App Store, but rather something like F-Droid.
I would love to be able to install weird, open source apps on my iPhone, the same way I could on my Android phones.
Curious timing, what with the EU DMA opening Play Store to make it easier for people to install it.
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?
Did Amazon start a new round of cost cutting, layoffs or something? Yesterday they discontinued Chime. As if Amazon is doubling down on cutting "unnecessary" services
Everyone at Amazon (The only company I have seen using it) hated using Chime, and it wasn't at all on the level of competitors. So I think it was just an unsuccessful product.
Every product has its hate, but everyone is rarely true. Personally (no longer at Amazon) I was impressed by Chime. It was simple, but rock solid, handling large calls well. Teams is still worse for me (>9 people display is bad, even in MS Edge, when on Linux). Zoom has a finicky interface.
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.
AWS (which isn't Amazon, really, even if they share resources), used to bake the cost of keeping the lights on practically forever, or at least until the last user churns. The product may not see improvements if it didn't get traction, but you could bank on being able to use it forever.
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.
They're also getting rid of the "Download & Transfer via USB" option for Kindle books, which was the last available option for directly removing DRM. But it does also mean that owners of older Kindle devices without WiFI are basically screwed.
I'm one of them. DJI "pro" remotes are Android devices that for some reason are completely un-googled but can run the Amazon app store; if you want to run, say, Litchy on such a device (an alternative to DJI Fly app), Amazon is (was) the only option.
Speaking of, I recently learned that Epic has started doing that on Android, too, but you have to sideload their .apk because of Google Hate: https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/mobile
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 wasn't just devices running Android natively, if you wanted to run Android apps on Windows you might have used the Amazon Appstore with the Windows Subsystem for Android which Microsoft is discontinuing.
It is likely that Microsoft's decision lead to this.
It might not be "supported", but I thought you could easily sideload play store and play services? You don't even need to muck around with rooting or even adb.
> Amazon's devices don't support the Google Play store...
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.
I have two Kindle Fire tablets (they're low-quality as general purpose tablets, but cheap and good for reading comics or books) and both have Google Play on them.
The Amazon Appstore is a steaming puddle of absolute crap for the most part. I have a Fire tablet I play some simple games on, they're all chock-full of ads. Very few mainstream apps are available, though plenty of cheap knockoffs of those apps are. If you want something good, it's easiest to grab the .apk and sideload it. There are ways to install the Play Store but they're likely beyond most of the Fire's userbase. Regular Android users won't notice or miss this nor should they.
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.
While this would negatively affect some of the apps I am using, I am overall glad Amazon is closing this. They should close all things they have done that lower the quality bar and more importantly, make sure the leaders in particular learn some hard lessons.
Ah, fond memories of using it on the BraillePlus 18, an old, discontinued Android-based Braille device that, since it didn't have a screen, couldn't be Play certified. Of course this was around Android 4.
The way I look at it is that boycotting Amazon is similar to boycotting petroleum. Petroleum is in the supply chain of everything that we use, but energy companies would definitely feel the impacts of everyone getting EVs.
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.)
Is that really so hard? I cancelled my Prime subscription years ago and haven't missed it. Walmart, Target, Costco, BestBuy, HomeDepot, etc haven't gone anywhere. Smaller specialty retailers usually sell on their own website with shipping too. Plus, one genuine advantage the other retailers have over Amazon is that you can (usually) trust you're getting something of reasonable quality, whereas Amazon feels like an AI generated flea market filled with garbage quality Aliexpress drop shipping schemes.
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.
Just stop giving Amazon money—at this point you can only blame yourself.
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.
So you've pretty much dropped Amazon the ecommerce store/platform. But what about any online services you consume? So many things online these days have some amount of AWS hosting involved.
Is amazon essentially going through a firing spree? Between rto friction and dropping stuff it looks like it wants to shed a lot of people from its payroll.
Not a problem for me, I only took the free apps from Amazon's store. If the same app was available on Play, I bought it there. It never made sense to me to pay for an app that was not on the native appstore and while I do have a Fire tablet and multiple FireTV Cubes, I was always more vested into the non-Amazon side of Android for phones.
"What happens to my apps after the discontinuation of the Amazon Appstore on Android?"
"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.
There needs to be some recourse here. Amazon isn't going bankrupt and closing business. They need to honor their customer commitments.
After all, earn trust and customer obsession are two of their leadership principles
Amazon has become incredibly inhospitable. Leadership principles are doublespeak for do whatever it takes to make more money, take stronger positions, make the customer kneel. Did you know their returns can now take up to 90 days to receive a refund? It is just one of the many many ways.
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
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I had a very hard time working there, maybe the worst time in my life. I worked with a lot of very smart people, but something about the company culture is doomed in a way I haven't seen before.
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.
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>They need to honor their customer commitments.
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.
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I'm sure you can take them to the small claims court, of course if you do that Amazon ban you from ever using any of their services. Given how many people rely on Amazon prime these days that's not a pleasant prospect.
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Even if they did go bankrupt, it's ridiculous that apps bought through that store would suddenly stop working. The mobile software industry way too closely ties applications to these "stores." Imagine if Ace Hardware went out of business and then suddenly my drill and hammers disappeared or stopped working!
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I'm surprised they're not just refunding all the purchases. I thought Amazon was still that kind of place. When they discontinued Amazon Cloud Cam in 2022, they sent out a replacement Blink camera for every Cloud Cam I had purchased, plus a year of free Blink service. This was 5 years after I had purchased the cameras, and they made no commitment to them working forever.
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When you say isn't closing business, that's precisely what they are doing. Amazon is an umbrella company with many business operating underneath it. Their app store is just another vertical like AWS is separate from the retail site. If they choose to stop offering a service, that's their prerogative.
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.
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>Amazon
>principles
> After all, earn trust and customer obsession are two of their leadership principles
You missed a "/s" at the end, I guess?
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Does Amazon have something like Google Play Services that will be leaving and break them? Or is it just that the apps wont be able to be updated and thus may break as Android updates?
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 jumped through some pretty giant hoops to make their play services "drop in" replacement, but idk if that's just for fire tablets or if it gets installed on Android too.
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As an app developer, I'm looking forward to having to answer all the emails asking for me to transfer their purchases to Google Play.
Do free promotions (https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...) still work ? And how would you even validate the emails against Amazon Appstore purchases?
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Is there a major barrier to just doing it for all your paid purchases?
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> If there are no options for a refund, then this is another reason not to purchase items that you never truly own.
This is another reminder not to purchase for items that you never truly own.
you don't truly own land in the US, so i guess no houses.
Move fast and break (your) things.
Not that it's okay, but App Store/Play Store do the same. They don't refund for apps that have become unavailable.
This is different though, isn’t it? Amazon still exists. The whole platform is shutting down. Individual devs aren’t taking down their apps.
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I thought most apps sell per-year subscriptions that then expire. Isn't that correct?
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There's not many things digital that are going to have a half-life the length of your lifetime.
There are. Anything that is a file in an open format will outlive me (given minimal care in terms of backups). My family photos, my markdown notes, non-DRM music and ebooks, proper applications. I’d say it’s all digital things, except for a small enshittified sliver.
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.
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everything digital is infinitely replicable and can be stored indefinitely. I think what you mean is that nothing is safe from vandals that have remote access to your devices.
Yeah, don't have high expectations for things you pay for but don't own. It's a sad truth, but I've accepted it (I also bought some dvds in 2024 which is something I never thought I'd do again).
Not sure about DVDs, but CDs weren't designed to last longer than 10 years. Most of my CD collection has physically rotted. Because I was using Windows Media Player and iTunes, I ripped most of collection in M4A format, which, at the time, was better than MP3. A couple of years ago, I decided that I wanted to re-rip my CD collection (some 200 odd CDs) in FLAC format instead of m4a format (don't ask). And some significant portion (50%?) of the new FLAC rips were missing tracks due to physical read errors on the original CD media.
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Sucks when you spend money on things and then they are taken away from you, isn't it.
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.
[flagged]
If I want to spin up a CI/CD pipeline to build an Android app that takes 30 seconds. I send you or anyone else the link and you can test it out.
With Apple I need to beg for my dev account to be approved, pay 100$ a year, and submit it via test flight.
If more than X numbers of people use it , ohh no I have to publish it via the app store. If it pleases King Cook, may I publish a game for my friends to play.
Google is starting to restrict Android too, custom system roms aren't as popular anymore, but theirs still a sense it's my phone.
With Apple, it's still Apple's phone, you've just purchased a revokable license to use it in accordance with the terms you agreed to.
> It's bad enough that I've had at least a dozen apps disappear from my iDevices over the years because the companies running them went out of business, pivoted, exited, or otherwise disappeared or stopped supporting their product. The last thing I want is for an entire app store's worth of apps to suddenly go away.
This happens just the same on iOS when Apple drops support for a device. First-party stores are not a defense against this. It's theoretically easier to plan for, but you're still at the mercy of Apple's support window.
Once upon a time you could download an app and it would work indefinitely, but that's not the way any modern app-store based systems really work. What Amazon is doing here is probably less impactful than when Apple kills certain APIs and breaks a bunch of apps with an update. (I'm certain Amazon and Apple both do estimated math about the number of devices/apps/users they're breaking, and I'm also certain just based on volume that Amazon is breaking fewer people/apps with this change than Apple does routinely.)
It's my understanding that the majority of people who want alternative app stores for iOS don't necessarily want something like an Amazon App Store, but rather something like F-Droid.
I would love to be able to install weird, open source apps on my iPhone, the same way I could on my Android phones.
Totally agree, but unfortunately people (forgive and) forget and that's why those companies keep on doing this.
I myself forgot Microsoft once (cough) sold e-books.
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I don't follow this logic. Amazon did something bad on their app store so now walled gardens are good?
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Or when Microsoft closed their music store.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_Music
Curious timing, what with the EU DMA opening Play Store to make it easier for people to install it.
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?
Did Amazon start a new round of cost cutting, layoffs or something? Yesterday they discontinued Chime. As if Amazon is doubling down on cutting "unnecessary" services
Everyone at Amazon (The only company I have seen using it) hated using Chime, and it wasn't at all on the level of competitors. So I think it was just an unsuccessful product.
Every product has its hate, but everyone is rarely true. Personally (no longer at Amazon) I was impressed by Chime. It was simple, but rock solid, handling large calls well. Teams is still worse for me (>9 people display is bad, even in MS Edge, when on Linux). Zoom has a finicky interface.
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.
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Slack huddles use chime under the hood.
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So, what are AWS TAMs going to use to have meetings with customers? Chime was really awful.
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On the other hand, at Amazon, people I know like Chime. Sad its going away.
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AWS (which isn't Amazon, really, even if they share resources), used to bake the cost of keeping the lights on practically forever, or at least until the last user churns. The product may not see improvements if it didn't get traction, but you could bank on being able to use it forever.
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.
They're also getting rid of the "Download & Transfer via USB" option for Kindle books, which was the last available option for directly removing DRM. But it does also mean that owners of older Kindle devices without WiFI are basically screwed.
I don't know if I'd reach that conclusion because of Chime - there's also Blink & Ring, a lot of overlap and confusion in cameras & security.
Chime is their online meetings app, not their doorbell camera
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Thank god chime is gone
All 6 people who used Amazon app store on a non-Fire tablet must be very upset!
I'm one of them. DJI "pro" remotes are Android devices that for some reason are completely un-googled but can run the Amazon app store; if you want to run, say, Litchy on such a device (an alternative to DJI Fly app), Amazon is (was) the only option.
Now there appears to be no option left.
Is sideloading possible?
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Use Aurora store?
Oh wow! Hopefully DJI will address this.
Now all we need to do is find the OTHER five people. :-P
Couldn't people move over to another app store like F-Droid?
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They used to give away premium apps like Epic does on PC, so even I have used them.
Speaking of, I recently learned that Epic has started doing that on Android, too, but you have to sideload their .apk because of Google Hate: https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/mobile
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 wasn't just devices running Android natively, if you wanted to run Android apps on Windows you might have used the Amazon Appstore with the Windows Subsystem for Android which Microsoft is discontinuing.
It is likely that Microsoft's decision lead to this.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/android/wsa/
> Amazon Appstore will continue to be available elsewhere, including on Fire TV and Fire Tablet devices.
Well, it'd better continue to be available, seeing that Amazon's devices don't support the Google Play store...
It might not be "supported", but I thought you could easily sideload play store and play services? You don't even need to muck around with rooting or even adb.
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> Amazon's devices don't support the Google Play store...
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).
I have two Kindle Fire tablets (they're low-quality as general purpose tablets, but cheap and good for reading comics or books) and both have Google Play on them.
Mind you, I had to sideload it for both of them.
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The Amazon Appstore is a steaming puddle of absolute crap for the most part. I have a Fire tablet I play some simple games on, they're all chock-full of ads. Very few mainstream apps are available, though plenty of cheap knockoffs of those apps are. If you want something good, it's easiest to grab the .apk and sideload it. There are ways to install the Play Store but they're likely beyond most of the Fire's userbase. Regular Android users won't notice or miss this nor should they.
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.
While this would negatively affect some of the apps I am using, I am overall glad Amazon is closing this. They should close all things they have done that lower the quality bar and more importantly, make sure the leaders in particular learn some hard lessons.
Ah, fond memories of using it on the BraillePlus 18, an old, discontinued Android-based Braille device that, since it didn't have a screen, couldn't be Play certified. Of course this was around Android 4.
This explains why Windows wsa is going away, since it was tied to this.
Just stop giving Amazon money—at this point you can only blame yourself.
I wonder if you could live a week mostly the same way you do now without touching any service that pays Amazon.
The way I look at it is that boycotting Amazon is similar to boycotting petroleum. Petroleum is in the supply chain of everything that we use, but energy companies would definitely feel the impacts of everyone getting EVs.
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.)
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Is that really so hard? I cancelled my Prime subscription years ago and haven't missed it. Walmart, Target, Costco, BestBuy, HomeDepot, etc haven't gone anywhere. Smaller specialty retailers usually sell on their own website with shipping too. Plus, one genuine advantage the other retailers have over Amazon is that you can (usually) trust you're getting something of reasonable quality, whereas Amazon feels like an AI generated flea market filled with garbage quality Aliexpress drop shipping schemes.
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.
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I spend $2/month on AWS and could change this, but use nothing else that I can think of; is this really that hard?
Just stop giving Amazon money—at this point you can only blame yourself.
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.
So you've pretty much dropped Amazon the ecommerce store/platform. But what about any online services you consume? So many things online these days have some amount of AWS hosting involved.
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If I need to to buy electronics here in Italy I either go on aliexpress (and goodbye warranty) or Amazon. There’s no Best Buy or Newegg here to go to
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My bet is that Amazon is working on a new OS that's not compatible with Android
Or is it the other way around: they're giving up on "FireOS" and just going to let Google do the work?
Good idea. Most people would probably be happier on a more stock Android with the Google Play Store.
my bet is they fired a few too people and now maintaining it is a burden
Big news if fifteen years ago
Why would they?
Full chain control, I suppose, there are rumours about Vega OS. https://www.androidauthority.com/android-14-based-fire-tvs-3...
If that's the case, it's a bad idea, Amazon is not prepared to maintain their own OS.
they'd probably be better off setting a pile of money on fire instead
At this rate, in a year of two, Amazon will have a reputation for killing products just like Google. It was Chime yesterday and now this.
Personally I still haven't gotten over Amazon's killing of the magazine subscription service.
Funnily enough I installed this recently to install a game I bought years ago.
I tried searching for it and found several outright scam apps. I figured Amazon had given up with it.
But Java doesn't even have union types
Stopped "purchasing" from them after i found out they wrapped their whole Store crap around apps and repackaged them.
I didnt even know this existed.
Is amazon essentially going through a firing spree? Between rto friction and dropping stuff it looks like it wants to shed a lot of people from its payroll.
Not a problem for me, I only took the free apps from Amazon's store. If the same app was available on Play, I bought it there. It never made sense to me to pay for an app that was not on the native appstore and while I do have a Fire tablet and multiple FireTV Cubes, I was always more vested into the non-Amazon side of Android for phones.
What took them so long
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https://www.failory.com/amazon