

  (Source: Reuters)

Amazon's "welcome packet" for prospective developers.  (Source:
The app market waters are about to get very deep










Comments     Threshold


RE: ok?
By melgross on 10/8/2010 11:50:37 AM , Rating: 2
You're missing the point here. If Amazon has a "no lower price than us" requirement, then the other dozen or so stores will as well. That will mean that you will have to go shop around to even find apps, and may never know where they are, or even if they exist, because searching in one store will only find what's in that store.

This isn't like buying a major product that you know about in advance. This is looking through apps in a category, and spotting what you might like, and what's got a good rating. With one store, that's far easier. This way, you will have to look through a bunch of stores, and may never find what you would have liked the most, because it might be where you didn't look.

Having third party sites try to compile this might not work either, because we don't know if Amazon, or others will allow it. And even if a third party can compile a listing of all programs and keep it up to date as does for Apple's app store, they may not be able to link to it as they do, requiring people to get the name of the app, and then go to that store to read about it, and possibly buy it.

While you seem to think this is easy, it's a heck of a lot more work than going to one place for things, and as has been shown, most people won't like that. It's one major reason why the Amazon music store has seen its sales stalled at lower that 8%, even though it links the songs you buy right to people's iTunes library for them. Most people would rather just buy from iTunes, even if the songs fron Amazon are a bit cheaper.

So your theory is wrong. This will just add to the mess.

