Amazon's New Ad Platform Lets App Developers Target Both Android And Fire Users
Context & Ripple Effects
The new ad platform is one piece of a 2015 developer push that already includes AWS Device Farm for testing apps on real Android and Fire OS devices and Amazon Fling, a toolkit for flinging media from mobile apps to Fire TV — together they let developers treat Amazon's ecosystem as a single target rather than separate Fire and Android audiences.
It also plants a flag in advertising ahead of later moves: Amazon's shopping-app video ads beta and the planned free ad-supported video news app for Fire TV show ads becoming an increasingly central business line for the company.
First-order effects
- App developers can now buy reach across both Android and Fire users through one Amazon product, consolidating spend they previously had to split across channels.
Second-order effects
- Google, whose Android game developers are already courted with its playable ad format, faces Amazon competing directly for the same developer ad budgets on Google's own platform.
- The unified audience pitch strengthens the case for developers to adopt Amazon's other cross-platform tools, since ads, testing, and distribution now reinforce each other.
Third-order effects
- If Amazon keeps unifying Fire and Android monetization, it positions itself as an advertising gatekeeper independent of Google Play — a structure the later Fire TV ad-supported app extends from apps to content.
The trend: Amazon is building a cross-platform developer stack — distribution, testing, media, and now advertising — that monetizes audiences regardless of whether they run Fire OS or stock Android.