Amazon plans to close its Appstore in China on July 17, 2023, after its 2022 announcement that the company would shutter its Kindle e-bookstore in the country
Coco Feng / South China Morning Post :
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second shoe to drop in Amazon's consumer retreat from China: the company already announced in 2022 that it would stop supplying Kindles to local retailers and close the e-bookstore on June 30, 2023, removing the Kindle app entirely in 2024. The marketplace itself was exited back in 2019 after failing to gain traction, with only AWS and Kindle sales left behind.
The Appstore's July 17 closure effectively ends what remains of Amazon's device-and-software footprint there — a market it once courted directly by shipping a Fire Tablet bundled with Baidu apps and services in 2015. It also foreshadows a wider pruning: Amazon would go on to discontinue the global Android Appstore and Coins currency in August 2025.
First-order effects
- Chinese Android users and developers who relied on Amazon's store as an alternative app-distribution channel lose it outright, with no replacement announced — mirroring how Kindle readers were given a fixed runway through the e-bookstore shutdown.
Second-order effects
- Developers previously listing apps in China must redistribute to local app stores or abandon the market, while Amazon concentrates remaining China operations on AWS and cross-border retail — the same consolidation logic that killed the marketplace in 2019.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — marketplace out in 2019, bookstore and now Appstore gone by 2023, then the global Android Appstore itself shut down in 2025 — Amazon's consumer-services exits become less about China specifically than about culling low-return storefronts worldwide, with China simply first in line.
The trend: Amazon is systematically dismantling its China-facing consumer services — marketplace, Kindle, and now Appstore — while retaining only cloud and cross-border commerce, a retreat that culminated in the global Appstore shutdown two years later.