Amazon’s alternative to the Android Market is celebrating its one-year anniversary.
To celebrate, the online retailer announced that it will have significant deals on apps for the next seven days. It started on Thursday with 67% off the list price of Plants vs. Zombies.
“Customers have used the Amazon Appstore to test drive and buy millions of apps and games for the Kindle Fire and other Android devices in the first year alone,” said Amazon Appstore director Aaron Rubenson.
According to a report published last month, more than 40% of the top-selling apps in the Android Market were doing better on Amazon’s platform than on the Android Market. That’s incredibly significant.
That means apps that were purchased through an external website, meaning users need to log onto a computer, register their Android phone, complete the purchase through Amazon, and follow the instructions on their Android phone to get the content, were doing better than the same apps that are available directly on the phone.
This is as much a testament to Amazon’s marketing abilities as it is to the broken nature of the Android Market, which despite being owned by the leader in online search engines made it unnecessarily difficult to find content. Now, Google has developed its new “Play” platform which is supposed to deliver a more seamless content discovery experience, so we’ll see if that changes anything.
For now, though, Amazon remains the place to go for users who want to find content for their Android device.
