Amazon Hints at Android Strategy With Latest App Promotion
Amazon is rolling out a new promotion on Monday that reveals how it could package together its various efforts in the wireless industry. — The first promotion kicking off at midnight will give customers who buy an Android device …
Context & Ripple Effects
This promotion is the next step after Amazon opened its own Android app store in September 2010 — a storefront built on someone else's platform, which only made sense if Amazon had a plan to drive traffic to it. Paying or rewarding customers who buy Android devices turns handset purchases into an acquisition funnel for that store.
First-order effects
- Customers buying Android devices get Amazon incentives starting at midnight, making retailers' and carriers' handset sales a distribution channel for Amazon's app store and content.
- The move lands days after Amazon confirmed Kindle library lending across 11,000-plus libraries with Whispersync for borrowed books, so device buyers are being pulled into both the app and reading ecosystems at once.
Second-order effects
- Google faces an alternative app storefront scaling on top of its own open platform just as Android passes iPhone in market share — the openness that drove adoption also lets Amazon capture the customer relationship.
- If the packaging works, it pressures other Android device sellers to bundle competing services, turning content and app incentives into standard point-of-sale currency rather than a differentiator.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward Amazon treating hardware as interchangeable inventory for its commerce-and-content engine — consistent with the long-rumored Amazon tablet that would compete more directly with the iPad than the Kindle does.
- For the broader industry, it sketches how retail-scale companies can build parallel ecosystems atop open mobile OSes, weakening the assumption that the platform owner controls monetization on its own devices.
The trend: Commerce giants are layering proprietary app and content storefronts over open mobile platforms, shifting value from the OS owner to whoever owns the customer relationship at checkout.