Amazon courting Apple's iOS developers to port apps to Kindle
Amazon is actively enticing Apple's iOS App Store developers to bring their efforts to the Kindle platform, particularly educational apps, in a strategy that attempts to push ebook readers up into competition with more sophisticated, general purpose tablets.
Context & Ripple Effects
The courtship of iOS developers is the answer to two old questions in this arc. Back in March 2009, coverage asked whether putting the Kindle on iPhone was 'Kindle cannibalism'; by September 2009 the open question was whether Amazon would ever let developers onto the device at all. In between came Apple tightening terms around the Kindle iOS app in early 2010, which showed how dependent Amazon's reading business had become on a rival's storefront rules.
Now, within days of opening its own Android-based Appstore — complete with the Test Drive try-before-you-buy feature reviewers found promising even after it briefly broke at launch — Amazon is recruiting the very developers who learned their trade on iOS, with educational apps called out as the beachhead. The move pairs naturally with reporting from ten days earlier asking whether an Android-powered Kindle is in the works: apps are how an e-reader stops being one.
First-order effects
- iOS developers, especially in education, gain a second US storefront and a hardware audience for ports of existing apps — Amazon's Appstore launch gives them somewhere concrete to ship.
- Apple loses its de facto exclusivity over a developer base it did nothing to recruit for Amazon, while Amazon's Kindle line gets a path out of the single-purpose-reader box.
Second-order effects
- Apple's response will be defensive rather than cooperative: tighter platform rules of the kind it already applied to the Kindle app in February 2010 push Amazon further toward web-based and sideloaded distribution workarounds.
- If the Android Kindle materializes, Google's own Android Market suddenly has a well-funded rival storefront competing for the same developers and the same device — pricing and revenue-share pressure follows immediately.
Third-order effects
- App retail consolidates around a few large curated stores owned by hardware-and-retail players, with developers maintaining parallel catalogs per store — the exclusivity economics of mobile platforms shift from one gatekeeper to a bargaining game among several.
- Educational content becomes the contested wedge: schools buying tablets choose ecosystems, so whoever owns the classroom catalog owns the upgrade cycle for the next generation of buyers.
The trend: E-reading devices are being pulled up-market into general-purpose app platforms, forcing every hardware vendor to run a developer storefront as table stakes.