Amazon Cloud Player Quietly Begins Working On iOS Devices!
Back in March, alongside the roll out of Amazon's new cloud-based music upload/player service, we noted one glaring problem: it didn't work on iOS devices. You might think this had to due with Flash or another technology that iOS wasn't compatible with, but it wasn't.
Context & Ripple Effects
When Amazon launched Cloud Player in late March 2011, it streamed music from computers and Android devices but pointedly left out iOS — a gap TechCrunch flagged at the time as a choice rather than a technical limitation. The quiet fix matters because it lands weeks after Amazon cut top tracks to 69 cents specifically to undercut iTunes, where it trails as a distant No. 2 in downloads.
The sequencing reads as deliberate: price first, then platform reach. With browser-based playback working on iPhones and iPads, Amazon can pitch its locker to Apple's install base without going through Apple's storefront at all.
First-order effects
- iPhone and iPad owners who uploaded music to Cloud Player can now stream their libraries on those devices, turning the March launch's biggest hole into a working feature overnight.
- Amazon gains access to Apple's device base while paying Apple nothing — no app approval, no 30% cut, no iTunes intermediary between buyer and library.
Second-order effects
- Apple faces a two-front attack on its music franchise: 69-cent pricing on hits plus cross-platform streaming reachable from its own hardware, raising pressure for a cloud-music countermove.
- Other locker services watching this space learn that HTML/browser delivery, not native apps, is the fastest route around platform gatekeepers — a playbook Apple itself demonstrated when it quietly enabled online streaming to iOS devices back in August 2010.
Third-order effects
- If web-delivered services keep bypassing app-store economics, platform owners lose leverage over content categories like music, shifting lock-in from the device to the user's uploaded library and account.
- Download sales give way to hosted collections as the unit of competition, pushing every major player toward cloud-first music regardless of which storefront sells the files.
The trend: Music is shifting from per-device purchased files to cloud-hosted libraries playable anywhere with a browser, letting Amazon attack iTunes simultaneously on price and platform reach.