Amazon is wooing app developers for upcoming smartphone with money, Amazon Web Services, more
Amazon's Hard Sell: Gaining Developers for Its Coming Smartphones — As Amazon prepares for the launch of its first smartphones, the company faces a daunting task: Ensuring that the devices …
Context & Ripple Effects
Amazon's first smartphone has been an open secret since Bloomberg reported in July 2012 that Amazon planned a device to vie with Apple, followed by Wall Street Journal confirmation that same month that Amazon was actively testing one. What is new now is that the pre-launch groundwork has moved from rumor to confirmed developer outreach: Amazon is courting app makers with direct payments and Amazon Web Services incentives ahead of a device it plans to announce in June and ship by end of September.
The playbook echoes the company's earlier Android push — back in April 2011 Amazon ran an app promotion widely read as a hint at its Android strategy — but the stakes are higher this time because coverage of the Appstore's early years flagged catalog and quality gaps that a phone launch would expose directly. That eight outlets from Mashable to SeekingAlpha carried the same-day story shows how closely the developer-courtship signal is being watched as a proxy for whether the device can escape the app-gap trap that killed other post-iPhone hardware entrants.
First-order effects
- App developers gain a funded reason to port and optimize for Amazon's Android fork before launch day, with AWS credits offsetting engineering costs they would otherwise eat themselves.
- Amazon must fill its appstore catalog fast enough to make the June-announced, September-shipped device credible against iOS and Google Play out of the gate — the exact weakness its own Appstore was criticized for back in 2011.
Second-order effects
- Google and Apple feel no immediate price pressure, but every dollar Amazon pays developers raises the subsidy bar any future third-platform entrant — Samsung's Tizen, Mozilla's Firefox OS — must clear to get equivalent catalog depth.
- AWS itself becomes a developer-acquisition weapon, cross-selling cloud accounts through the phone program and giving Amazon's enterprise arm a consumer-facing funnel competitors' cloud units lack.
Third-order effects
- If paid developer recruitment proves necessary even for a company with Amazon's brand and distribution, it cements the pattern that mobile platforms are won by buying ecosystems, not shipping hardware — raising the capital threshold for any would-be fourth ecosystem.
- The move pushes Amazon further from being a retailer that sells devices toward being a services company that uses devices as storefronts, tying the phone to the same flywheel logic as Prime and Kindle.
The trend: Hardware entrants lacking app-store gravity are increasingly buying developer ecosystems outright with cash and cloud-service incentives rather than waiting for organic adoption.