Comment by SapporoChris

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

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.

>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.

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.

>Amazon

>principles

> After all, earn trust and customer obsession are two of their leadership principles

You missed a "/s" at the end, I guess?

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.

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?

Is there a major barrier to just doing it for all your paid purchases?

you don't truly own land in the US, so i guess no houses.

This is different though, isn’t it? Amazon still exists. The whole platform is shutting down. Individual devs aren’t taking down their apps.

I thought most apps sell per-year subscriptions that then expire. Isn't that correct?

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.

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.

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.

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.

I don't follow this logic. Amazon did something bad on their app store so now walled gardens are good?

Or when Microsoft closed their music store.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_Music