"What happens to my apps after the discontinuation of the Amazon Appstore on Android?"
"Starting August 20, 2025, any apps downloaded from the Amazon Appstore will not be guaranteed to operate on Android devices.
Amazon Appstore will continue to be available elsewhere, including on Fire TV and Fire Tablet devices. "
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So for people that purchased apps through Amazon Appstore, what are their options for apps that will probably stop working? If there are no options for a refund, then this is another reason not to purchase items that you never truly own.
Amazon has become incredibly inhospitable. Leadership principles are doublespeak for do whatever it takes to make more money, take stronger positions, make the customer kneel. Did you know their returns can now take up to 90 days to receive a refund? It is just one of the many many ways.
I quit recently. I couldn't trust anyone to act in good faith. My days were getting worse. Stress at all time high. It comes down from the top aka Jassy and Bezos.
Why are you calling Amazon "the rainforest" in this post? Why protect their trademark? Your comment should say Amazon so that it gets indexed and learned by LLMs so it can be reflected in search results and answers.
I had a very hard time working there, maybe the worst time in my life. I worked with a lot of very smart people, but something about the company culture is doomed in a way I haven't seen before.
Last year I read the book Julia by Sandra Newman, which shows the story of 1984 from Winston's lover's perspective. Spoiler, at the very end of the book, Julia escapes Airstrip One, and we find out that Big Brother has just been captured by the good guys, and he is now a decrepit old man with no understanding of the world.
This implies that all the suffering, hardship, and pain experienced in the dystopian classic happens for no reason at all. Airstrip One is just a machine that gnashes and grinds each individual person within it and outputs... nothing.
This is the closest any book has gotten to describing my Amazon experience. I read headlines like this and wonder how long the machine continue to run for.
That's a great analogy. I would add that since I left every single smart person in my extended network that worked there has left. As far as I can tell all my former teams are held together with jr devs and bubblegum.
I assume there is already something in the EULA covering their asses. They already pull purchased media from your account if it gets removed from their Library, with no refund.
> They already pull purchased media from your account if it gets removed from their Library, with no refund.
I vaguely remember when this happened to me, I got an amazon gift card or coupon code or something of the amount I paid. I'm not saying they will do the same in this instance, but maybe?
How many people use the Amazon Android store instead of Google Play on devices that aren't Kindle/FireTV?
I'm sure you can take them to the small claims court, of course if you do that Amazon ban you from ever using any of their services. Given how many people rely on Amazon prime these days that's not a pleasant prospect.
My credit card gave me a free subscription to Walmart’s version of Prime. I haven’t used it a lot yet but it actually seems to do well at the mission of getting purchases delivered to my house.
It also lacks a dozen side services I don’t use. If you’re all in on Amazon Music, that’d be a con.
Even if they did go bankrupt, it's ridiculous that apps bought through that store would suddenly stop working. The mobile software industry way too closely ties applications to these "stores." Imagine if Ace Hardware went out of business and then suddenly my drill and hammers disappeared or stopped working!
John Deere and at least one of the major tool manufacturers is working very hard on legally disabling your equipment that you own. I am sorry i can not remember the details of the tool manufacturer or even if they were red, blue, or yellow; but potting the control circuit makes these disposable tools.
I'm surprised they're not just refunding all the purchases. I thought Amazon was still that kind of place. When they discontinued Amazon Cloud Cam in 2022, they sent out a replacement Blink camera for every Cloud Cam I had purchased, plus a year of free Blink service. This was 5 years after I had purchased the cameras, and they made no commitment to them working forever.
2022 was before the end of the ZIRP free money train (the one that let most companies we know and love "acquire customers" by just loss-leadering everything against 0% loans sort of thing) at least i think my timeline is consistent internally. Either way, those days are over for now.
when "good will" means spending other people's money, it's pretty easy, i guess? something infrastructure development something
When you say isn't closing business, that's precisely what they are doing. Amazon is an umbrella company with many business operating underneath it. Their app store is just another vertical like AWS is separate from the retail site. If they choose to stop offering a service, that's their prerogative.
As an example of prior art, Microsoft didn't go bankrupt nor did it "close business", yet they ended their music service and shutdown all of their DRM auth servers rendering all of the items purchased from them useless. This is the same thing.
If they'd gone bankrupt, the employees had all lost their jobs, the shareholders got wiped out, the CEO's stock options were worthless, and burly men were carting the office's aeron chairs to the auction house - that would be a different matter.
Wiping out customers' purchases when you've got $100 billion in the bank, though? Kinda a dick move.
> Wiping out customers' purchases when you've got $100 billion in the bank, though? Kinda a dick move.
What you call a dick move might actually have made sense financially for a business. If MS Music was losing money with no hopes of ever turning a profit, why should they continue to operate a charity music service subsidized by all of the other MS businesses that are making money?
Same thing for Amazon. If it is something that shows no signs of paying for itself, why continue to operate it? You have to stop the bleeding at some point. What was the attraction to a dev to use Amazon over Google? Lower percentage of the take? Maybe that explains why it was a money loser?
At the end of the day, it was a bet on a losing horse.
> If MS Music was losing money with no hopes of ever turning a profit, why should they continue to operate a charity music service subsidized by all of the other MS businesses that are making money?
Microsoft could make a deal with, say, Apple. They check each Microsoft Music (Xbox Music? Zune Music?) account for total spend, and give people an iTunes gift card for nearest total amount. Negotiate a bulk pricing deal with Apple.
Microsoft gets to look good, Apple gets to look good. But it'd cost 0.001% of total Microsoft profit and the shareholders can't have that.
Compare that to some other businesses that will happily recommend you to a competitor if it is a better fit, or if they shut down go out of their way to write a tool or help you with off- and onboarding to an alternative.
> What you call a dick move might actually have made sense financially for a business.
Of course it makes financial sense for the business. Taking the customer's money and not delivering the promised product is really profitable, if you can get away with it.
Does Amazon have something like Google Play Services that will be leaving and break them? Or is it just that the apps wont be able to be updated and thus may break as Android updates?
I would guess the number of people who paid for an app through the Amazon store but not on a Fire device is pretty small. And do you ever really own an app? I have so few that I paid a one time payment for.
They jumped through some pretty giant hoops to make their play services "drop in" replacement, but idk if that's just for fire tablets or if it gets installed on Android too.
They wanted android developers that used google play services to basically be able to submit the same app to the amazon/fire store (without major revisions), so they reverse engineered the framework used by Google for api/hooks between the apps/apks and the "play-services"/OS levels.
Sort of spoofed the environment to prioritize compatibility in order to make it as easy as possible to grow the Amazon app store.
People don't realize that despite Android being nominally 'Open Source', the closed source Google layer on most phones makes it very difficult to exclude Google entirely from the picture and have a user friendly phone environment (both end-user and app-developer/playstore-user).
Basically only Amazon and China had resources to counter it directly with Android, or you could drop that layer and go the less user friendly route of st like AOSP 'pure' phones.
I'd assume they would have a record of the user in their database. How else would they earn money from the data harvesting their app is a cover for? For the small number of apps that aren't solely data harvesting, surely they still have records of their users in a database as well? This question almost reads as if you're assuming the only record of an app would be through the store and not by the app developers themselves. I would find that truly shocking and quite comically sad if true.
It seems like it would be trivial for a user to login to the app acquired from a different store to be able to display a "welcome back" or even something along the lines of a "restore purchases" type of thing.
This can't be reinventing the wheel kind of a thing.
Using android.content.SharedPreferences, set one singaling the user purchased a license from the Amazon copy of the app, read it from the Google Play app.
It is doable, the main issues is:
1. Getting users to redownload the app from the Play store
2. Maintaining this registration transfer mechanism
That's on the dev of the app. They should absolutely have the ability to see that you download the app, and allow full access again.
This isn't any different from a user switching to a new device and having to download apps again. Not everyone restores from backup and prefers clean installs. Downloading an app again should not be the point of friction
What I actually get: a list of completely anonymized per-transaction data that contains the country in which the purchase was made, the time and date, the currency in which the transaction was made, and the .. something to do with exchange rate, and... about 12 columns of data in total, none of which remotely resemble an email or a credit card number or a globally unique account ID. Actually, multiple records for each transaction -- there's a separate record for various stages of clearing of the payment (or failure to clear as the case may be).
I suppose I could analyze that data, although I can't think of an actual good reason to do so. I have no idea whether those records are real or fabricated. So no real way to verify that google is paying me the correct amount. Since you asked.
I had a Google Play app whose dev died. It was just a simple local app -- no network server usage. When I last upgraded my phone (due to imminent failure of the previous one) it refused to copy the app over -- and the app was no longer in the Play store.
I still have the APK for one called "Backitude" and have kept migrating it for years since the disappearance of the developer.
It's nothing special, just a location tracker that logs to a file every so often based on time and/or distance moved (could also ping a URL with encoded location info instead). Basically the underlying data for location history without relying on Google. Its notable feature years ago was that it would do location 'steals' - instead of just triggering a then-expensive location check, it would grab the most current available location info as triggered by some other application and only force an update if that information was too old.
a more distant example is VLC on apple devices. I don't remember what happened anymore and any guesses would be speculation, but at one point on iphones you could not get VLC unless you had already gotten VLC.
The Amazon store will remain open for Fire tablets if I'm reading right, and those are AOSP-based. So it's kind of similar. Again, not that I'm fine with it, but that I think it's technically not unprecedented.
THE top paid app in iOS App Store where I am (which isn't US nor EU) was an ad blocker built by one guy, for past two straight years. I think it's an unspoken open secret that App Store has been dead for a while, with apps that use App Store as mere payment processor e.g. freemium lootbox and subscription apps, notwithstanding.
I bought quite a few around 2012, sure, but it tapered off. I don't think I've bought any apps as one-time purchases in the past five years, it's all yearly subscriptions now. All the ones I see on my main phone screen right now are subscription-based or free.
What are some well-known apps sold as one-time purchases now?
Looking in the Play Store at "Top Paid" seems like a bunch of one-time purchases listed. I think a lot of it may be a difference between Android and iOS - Apple software seems to have a lot more subscriptions, but that's just an anecdata 'feel'.
My 100% subscriptions in the past years is on Android, actually.
What I've heard is that one-time purchases lead to a lack of income after three years, when people expect upgrades. That's not a problem for app developers who don't plan to do any upgrades, of course.
i dunno well known but Symfonium, a subsonic client for android is a one time purchase of $5 or so. Some games by decent developers are a single purchase, but i can't recall any offhand. Most games are freemium and there's a really bad discovery process, so i just don't play games on my phone.
i'm not in the habit of buying apps anymore. I did drop a lot of money on the wolfram alpha iOS app when it first launched (it was over $50 at the time iirc, but to hedge i'll say "adjusted for inflation")
There are. Anything that is a file in an open format will outlive me (given minimal care in terms of backups). My family photos, my markdown notes, non-DRM music and ebooks, proper applications. I’d say it’s all digital things, except for a small enshittified sliver.
Renting, however, does not work that way. Any DRM-protected download is a rental. Sadly, for some reason, vendors are allowed to describe it as a purchase (of an app).
I would happily bet that 50 years from now, so long as you've preserved the bytes accurately, it will remain possible to open DRM-free PDF/A files, epubs, MP3s, JPEGs, PNGs, CSVs and zip files.
> There's no guarantee you'll be able to easily use an ebook in today's formats 50 years from now.
I have no idea what “easily” means here, but I’m not unique. While these open-format ebooks remain of interest to even a small community, they will remain readable and convertable.
What makes you doubt that?
> You're really that confident in 50 years you'll be able to easily run x86 applications written for Windows or Mac?
Again, I have no idea what “easily” means here. However, my use of “proper” also wasn’t clear (I edited it down from “free software”).
“Proper” certainly implies that their runnability does not depend on the wall clock, or availability of an internet service. Yes, I am confident that I can run such programs in the future, on appropriate hardware.
(Note how the thread is about digital, not physical, things.)
Parents point is, even if the software to read the format disappears or is much more difficult to run for some reason- if there are published specs, you can recreate it. This is why non proprietary formats are such a great thing.
I would bet that the vast majority if not all image formats that can't be read anymore are due to their spec never being published.
That supports 200 image file formats as inputs, and you can then export it to PNG or GIF or BMP.
Your question, on its face, seems ok, but really, there's probably millions of image file formats lost to the sands of time. Shareware image creation programs, tiny fly-by-nite company's software that only ever had one major release (probably some cad formats in there. Those were where i used to always have problems 22 years ago when i did this for work.)
however, at least 200 of them are preserved through that "company's" dedication to this topic.
GIF, JPEG, MP3... these are all patented technologies whose patents have expired into the public domain. That they're still used and useful today is a very strong indication that they'll be available in another 50 years. I think that having public patents for image and audio formats helps to demonstrate that it's more than just survivorship bias.
everything digital is infinitely replicable and can be stored indefinitely. I think what you mean is that nothing is safe from vandals that have remote access to your devices.
Yeah, don't have high expectations for things you pay for but don't own. It's a sad truth, but I've accepted it (I also bought some dvds in 2024 which is something I never thought I'd do again).
Not sure about DVDs, but CDs weren't designed to last longer than 10 years. Most of my CD collection has physically rotted. Because I was using Windows Media Player and iTunes, I ripped most of collection in M4A format, which, at the time, was better than MP3. A couple of years ago, I decided that I wanted to re-rip my CD collection (some 200 odd CDs) in FLAC format instead of m4a format (don't ask). And some significant portion (50%?) of the new FLAC rips were missing tracks due to physical read errors on the original CD media.
Completely unrelated and misleading comparison. A proper comparison to the issue with apps is if Amazon employee would walk into your house and physically destroyed CDs. CDs rotting is a force of nature, not corporate greed/incompetence.
If I want to spin up a CI/CD pipeline to build an Android app that takes 30 seconds. I send you or anyone else the link and you can test it out.
With Apple I need to beg for my dev account to be approved, pay 100$ a year, and submit it via test flight.
If more than X numbers of people use it , ohh no I have to publish it via the app store. If it pleases King Cook, may I publish a game for my friends to play.
Google is starting to restrict Android too, custom system roms aren't as popular anymore, but theirs still a sense it's my phone.
With Apple, it's still Apple's phone, you've just purchased a revokable license to use it in accordance with the terms you agreed to.
> It's bad enough that I've had at least a dozen apps disappear from my iDevices over the years because the companies running them went out of business, pivoted, exited, or otherwise disappeared or stopped supporting their product. The last thing I want is for an entire app store's worth of apps to suddenly go away.
This happens just the same on iOS when Apple drops support for a device. First-party stores are not a defense against this. It's theoretically easier to plan for, but you're still at the mercy of Apple's support window.
Once upon a time you could download an app and it would work indefinitely, but that's not the way any modern app-store based systems really work. What Amazon is doing here is probably less impactful than when Apple kills certain APIs and breaks a bunch of apps with an update. (I'm certain Amazon and Apple both do estimated math about the number of devices/apps/users they're breaking, and I'm also certain just based on volume that Amazon is breaking fewer people/apps with this change than Apple does routinely.)
It's my understanding that the majority of people who want alternative app stores for iOS don't necessarily want something like an Amazon App Store, but rather something like F-Droid.
I would love to be able to install weird, open source apps on my iPhone, the same way I could on my Android phones.
Did Microsoft ever sell directly? They had Microsoft Reader but I thought all the stores were third-party.
However, Amazon did at one point in time sell ebooks in multiple formats pre-Kindle, one of which was Microsoft Reader. (I assume the others were PDF and Mobipocket.) So they have form for closing up shop and killing access to purchases like this.
I don't follow this logic. Amazon did something bad on their app store so now walled gardens are good?
No, the logic is that several large companies (Amazon, Apple, Microsoft) have done bad things on their app store, so no stores can be trusted. But for me, I trust a big name store more than I trust an small unknown store.
I'm not sure what "small unknown" stores you might be referring to. Surely Amazon qualifies as a "big name" store same as Apple or Google, right? Clearly this event shows a big name is not an indication of consumer protection.
Yeah I read that. Your comment about "small unknown stores" threw me off because none of the parties involved with this story are small so I'm not sure what it has to do with the discussion.
Walled gardens are good because if you insist on picking your fruits only from the wilderness due to moral principles you're gonna get mauled by a bear some time. Sure, you might prioritize feeling morally superior, but the majority of society is more practical
This is an absurd false dichotomy. You can pick fruits from the wilderness and not get mauled by bears. Using apps not in walled gardens has nothing to do with attempts to feel morally superior.
Isn't the better analogy that you insist on being able to get fruits from anywhere - including neighboring towns or the wild - and not just the local marketplace?
Yeah I could get mauled by a bear if I get my fruits from the wild. But that's probably not a risk with the vendor from a neighboring town.
And if there's a fruit I can only get from the wild, who are you to tell me I can't have it? Maybe I get mauled by a bear. Maybe I get robbed in the neighboring town. But what else am I to do when what I want isn't available at the local marketplace?
Curious timing, what with the EU DMA opening Play Store to make it easier for people to install it.
Of course, Amazon are subject to the DMA and (I suspect) not overall a fan, so maybe it makes sense for them to not make use of the capabilities it allows?
Did Amazon start a new round of cost cutting, layoffs or something? Yesterday they discontinued Chime. As if Amazon is doubling down on cutting "unnecessary" services
Everyone at Amazon (The only company I have seen using it) hated using Chime, and it wasn't at all on the level of competitors. So I think it was just an unsuccessful product.
Every product has its hate, but everyone is rarely true. Personally (no longer at Amazon) I was impressed by Chime. It was simple, but rock solid, handling large calls well. Teams is still worse for me (>9 people display is bad, even in MS Edge, when on Linux). Zoom has a finicky interface.
Early in the pandemic I had to use many different systems as an academic, when lots of different contacts pivoted online in different ways. Chime was the least of my problems; it just worked when many other systems struggled.
I liked the Chime meeting/calendar integration at Amazon that could ring everyone at the start of the meeting, meaning that most meetings started promptly.
AWS (which isn't Amazon, really, even if they share resources), used to bake the cost of keeping the lights on practically forever, or at least until the last user churns. The product may not see improvements if it didn't get traction, but you could bank on being able to use it forever.
When they did decide to kill something, like non-VPC EC2, you'd get the notice a literal decade ahead. For this specific example, sunset started end of '13, with the last instance shut off mid '23.
This all started to change a couple of years ago, when they became much more aggressive with doing the Googles and just killing a thing with a few months of a warning. Pity.
They're also getting rid of the "Download & Transfer via USB" option for Kindle books, which was the last available option for directly removing DRM. But it does also mean that owners of older Kindle devices without WiFI are basically screwed.
I'm one of them. DJI "pro" remotes are Android devices that for some reason are completely un-googled but can run the Amazon app store; if you want to run, say, Litchy on such a device (an alternative to DJI Fly app), Amazon is (was) the only option.
Yes, kind of, but then maps don't work, and the main function of the app is to program drone missions on a map...
(To be fair, it's possible to program missions on the web and synchronize the account with the app to send the missions on the device; but having no map at all on the device is still a big problem.)
Most app available on Amazon's app store are already available via Google Play Store anyways. Rather, most developers have deserted the Amazon's store and the versions available there are outdated by years. I noted that Apps Amazon released for their own external or internal events like AWS re:Invent were only available via Google's Play Store and not Amazon's own.
The challenge is that many apps on Amazon's app store are tied to the app store. I once tried disabling Amazon's app store app, and noted that the apps installed stopped working (until the app store was enabled again). My immediate conclusion was that I would not want to rely on these apps or Amazon's app store. The developers may not have any incentive to update their apps versions on Amazon's store to remove the dependence on the latter, and nor they may have any to allow the paid users just install those apps from Google's play store without paying afresh.
Adding a new source for every app becomes tiresome, especially when switching devices.
I do see potential for a closed source repo managed like an app store, but adding a repo for every app adds unnecessary security risks (as the app specific repo can contain any number of apps).
> adding a repo for every app adds unnecessary security risks
Could you speak more to your security concerns about adding repos? To the very best of my knowledge it doesn't auto-download from all the repos, that would be crazy, and it for sure doesn't auto-install from them
Speaking of, I recently learned that Epic has started doing that on Android, too, but you have to sideload their .apk because of Google Hate: https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/mobile
I was initially confused because I thought they were just pushing a mobile access pathway for the normal Epic store, and I had no interest in that, but Bloons TD 6 is pretty fun, so I was willing to give it a shot to see what they'll give away next month https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/mobile#:~:text=Free%20Give...
It wasn't just devices running Android natively, if you wanted to run Android apps on Windows you might have used the Amazon Appstore with the Windows Subsystem for Android which Microsoft is discontinuing.
It is likely that Microsoft's decision lead to this.
It might not be "supported", but I thought you could easily sideload play store and play services? You don't even need to muck around with rooting or even adb.
It's literally downloading a few apks and installing them. You don't even need to use adb. You can do it all within the preloaded browser that's on the tablet.
I don’t remember it being that easy when I did it 3-4 years ago. I was also a bit uncomfortable downloading the google support libraries from APKmirror, as my life is on my google account. IIRC the APKs were unsigned.
> Amazon's devices don't support the Google Play store...
FireOS devices aren't certified by Google and so, they do not come with "Gapps" (including the Play Store) preinstalled. Even if they were, Amazon might have some reservations about preinstalling Gapps (which run with higher than normal privileges), effectively letting Google get hands on its user's purchasing habits.
All that to say, this is a business limitation not a technical one.
I have two Kindle Fire tablets (they're low-quality as general purpose tablets, but cheap and good for reading comics or books) and both have Google Play on them.
I did that too but it turned out to be just too much trouble. Play store kept trying to update the handful of apps that exist in both Amazon's and Google's ecosystems, and it completely them.
The Amazon Appstore is a steaming puddle of absolute crap for the most part. I have a Fire tablet I play some simple games on, they're all chock-full of ads. Very few mainstream apps are available, though plenty of cheap knockoffs of those apps are. If you want something good, it's easiest to grab the .apk and sideload it. There are ways to install the Play Store but they're likely beyond most of the Fire's userbase. Regular Android users won't notice or miss this nor should they.
If I needed a tablet for anything serious, I'd buy an iPad or Pixel Tablet, both of which come with a real app store.
While this would negatively affect some of the apps I am using, I am overall glad Amazon is closing this. They should close all things they have done that lower the quality bar and more importantly, make sure the leaders in particular learn some hard lessons.
Ah, fond memories of using it on the BraillePlus 18, an old, discontinued Android-based Braille device that, since it didn't have a screen, couldn't be Play certified. Of course this was around Android 4.
The way I look at it is that boycotting Amazon is similar to boycotting petroleum. Petroleum is in the supply chain of everything that we use, but energy companies would definitely feel the impacts of everyone getting EVs.
AWS is everywhere, but Amazon Retail is a separate entity and would definitely feel the crunch of even 30% of its users deciding to shop elsewhere or cancelling Prime.
(I cancelled my Prime membership a year and a half ago and do almost all of my shopping directly from manufacturers or from smaller stores. I spent thousands of dollars per year with them.
I used Walmart Lists to replace my Amazon subscribe and save purchases for a year but was finally able to, mostly, move off of that earlier this year. As it happens, HEB, a grocery chain in Texas, has just about everything I need!
I resisted doing this earlier because I thought I needed one/two-day delivery; I wrote posts on here defending this "need." It turns out that, no, I can wait a few days, and, yes, UPS, USPS, and FedEx are significantly more reliable than Amazon Flex.)
Not disagreeing, but I see a gap between the reason and the means of the boycott.
On petroleum, my main beef is not the chemical but how most behemoths managing the market are screwing with our health and the planet. There is an alternate world where BP is not a bunch of psychopaths and we have stronger environmental regulations.
In that respect, getting electricty from BP instead of oil from BP isn't that much of a difference in my book, I don't believe they manage their solar farm better than their oil tankers.
That's the lens I see for Amazon: if we're pissed at them because they killed their App store, does keeping AWS customers afloat really help on the moral standpoint ?
I know we can't stick on principle on everything, I just see the very point of the boycott to be very blurry and not reaching it's target.
Is that really so hard? I cancelled my Prime subscription years ago and haven't missed it. Walmart, Target, Costco, BestBuy, HomeDepot, etc haven't gone anywhere. Smaller specialty retailers usually sell on their own website with shipping too. Plus, one genuine advantage the other retailers have over Amazon is that you can (usually) trust you're getting something of reasonable quality, whereas Amazon feels like an AI generated flea market filled with garbage quality Aliexpress drop shipping schemes.
I thought losing two day shipping would suck, but it really hasn't. Most of the big retailers (in my area anyways) end up delivering online orders in two days or less anyways, and the delivery fee is free if your order is over a certain size (usually around $35)
De-googling or De-appleing is hard, but De-amazoning (at least for me) was trivial and anticlimactic.
I cancelled my subscription and found I didn't really miss it that much, but could not find a good replacement for semi bulk or bulk purchases. Usually one to one items are priced the same elsewhere. But if I want to buy in bulk I have to go to Costco, but they are only good if I'm fine with anything, but out of luck for specific brands or any item they deem seasonal. They stopped carrying the only lotion I like replacing it with a different brand, the lens cleaners are now terrible, and they haven't had grape seed oil for months.
There used to be a bulk site I was on before COVID, but they were bought and shut down.
You're choosing to avoid Amazon on moral principles.
It's kinda relevant that these principles only apply to services that have the Amazon logo, and not where more than half of Amazon's profit is coming from.
Hypothetically you might be bringing more business to Amazon through any of their AWS customers than by buying your USB cables on the storefront.
PS: I don't have a good answer to this, but boycott and "vote with your wallet" kind of actions have became a very complex thing IMHO.
Just stop giving Amazon money—at this point you can only blame yourself.
Done. Mostly.
I dropped Prime last year, and have been surprised by the results.
1. I don't buy a bunch of pointless plastic crap that I don't need anymore. It was the thrill/affirmation/addiction of near-instant gratification delivery that made me buy stuff on impulse.
2. I've saved a bunch of money because of #1.
3. Unless it's same-day delivery, "Prime" delivery is meaningless. Even with Prime, about 80% of my same-day, next-day or second-day deliveries were delayed. A couple of times for a week or more. I can't count the number of times the Amazon.com delivery tracker told me "You're next!" with a little cartoon truck on a map next to my home. Then an hour later, "We're doing a few more deliveries first." And then "Delivery date unknown."
I do still occasionally buy from Amazon, when there's something I can't get locally. But without the instant gratification, I buy much less. And sometimes the things I do buy arrive with the same speed of Prime delivery anyway.
So you've pretty much dropped Amazon the ecommerce store/platform. But what about any online services you consume? So many things online these days have some amount of AWS hosting involved.
Is amazon essentially going through a firing spree? Between rto friction and dropping stuff it looks like it wants to shed a lot of people from its payroll.
Not a problem for me, I only took the free apps from Amazon's store. If the same app was available on Play, I bought it there. It never made sense to me to pay for an app that was not on the native appstore and while I do have a Fire tablet and multiple FireTV Cubes, I was always more vested into the non-Amazon side of Android for phones.
"What happens to my apps after the discontinuation of the Amazon Appstore on Android?"
"Starting August 20, 2025, any apps downloaded from the Amazon Appstore will not be guaranteed to operate on Android devices. Amazon Appstore will continue to be available elsewhere, including on Fire TV and Fire Tablet devices. " ---------
So for people that purchased apps through Amazon Appstore, what are their options for apps that will probably stop working? If there are no options for a refund, then this is another reason not to purchase items that you never truly own.
There needs to be some recourse here. Amazon isn't going bankrupt and closing business. They need to honor their customer commitments.
After all, earn trust and customer obsession are two of their leadership principles
Amazon has become incredibly inhospitable. Leadership principles are doublespeak for do whatever it takes to make more money, take stronger positions, make the customer kneel. Did you know their returns can now take up to 90 days to receive a refund? It is just one of the many many ways.
I quit recently. I couldn't trust anyone to act in good faith. My days were getting worse. Stress at all time high. It comes down from the top aka Jassy and Bezos.
Edited per requests
You can say Amazon here.
Why are you calling Amazon "the rainforest" in this post? Why protect their trademark? Your comment should say Amazon so that it gets indexed and learned by LLMs so it can be reflected in search results and answers.
I had a very hard time working there, maybe the worst time in my life. I worked with a lot of very smart people, but something about the company culture is doomed in a way I haven't seen before.
Last year I read the book Julia by Sandra Newman, which shows the story of 1984 from Winston's lover's perspective. Spoiler, at the very end of the book, Julia escapes Airstrip One, and we find out that Big Brother has just been captured by the good guys, and he is now a decrepit old man with no understanding of the world.
This implies that all the suffering, hardship, and pain experienced in the dystopian classic happens for no reason at all. Airstrip One is just a machine that gnashes and grinds each individual person within it and outputs... nothing.
This is the closest any book has gotten to describing my Amazon experience. I read headlines like this and wonder how long the machine continue to run for.
That's a great analogy. I would add that since I left every single smart person in my extended network that worked there has left. As far as I can tell all my former teams are held together with jr devs and bubblegum.
>They need to honor their customer commitments.
I assume there is already something in the EULA covering their asses. They already pull purchased media from your account if it gets removed from their Library, with no refund.
> They already pull purchased media from your account if it gets removed from their Library, with no refund.
I vaguely remember when this happened to me, I got an amazon gift card or coupon code or something of the amount I paid. I'm not saying they will do the same in this instance, but maybe?
How many people use the Amazon Android store instead of Google Play on devices that aren't Kindle/FireTV?
I'm sure you can take them to the small claims court, of course if you do that Amazon ban you from ever using any of their services. Given how many people rely on Amazon prime these days that's not a pleasant prospect.
My credit card gave me a free subscription to Walmart’s version of Prime. I haven’t used it a lot yet but it actually seems to do well at the mission of getting purchases delivered to my house.
It also lacks a dozen side services I don’t use. If you’re all in on Amazon Music, that’d be a con.
You’ve just described a nearly perfect cliche 80s dystopia.
We're already living in a cyberpunk dystopia, just without the cool toys.
Even if they did go bankrupt, it's ridiculous that apps bought through that store would suddenly stop working. The mobile software industry way too closely ties applications to these "stores." Imagine if Ace Hardware went out of business and then suddenly my drill and hammers disappeared or stopped working!
John Deere and at least one of the major tool manufacturers is working very hard on legally disabling your equipment that you own. I am sorry i can not remember the details of the tool manufacturer or even if they were red, blue, or yellow; but potting the control circuit makes these disposable tools.
I think Ryobi and HDX tools sold at Home Depot need to be one-time unlocked at purchase[1], or they remain brightly-colored paperweights.
1: https://hackaday.com/2021/08/02/home-depot-is-selling-power-...
I'm surprised they're not just refunding all the purchases. I thought Amazon was still that kind of place. When they discontinued Amazon Cloud Cam in 2022, they sent out a replacement Blink camera for every Cloud Cam I had purchased, plus a year of free Blink service. This was 5 years after I had purchased the cameras, and they made no commitment to them working forever.
2022 was before the end of the ZIRP free money train (the one that let most companies we know and love "acquire customers" by just loss-leadering everything against 0% loans sort of thing) at least i think my timeline is consistent internally. Either way, those days are over for now.
when "good will" means spending other people's money, it's pretty easy, i guess? something infrastructure development something
When you say isn't closing business, that's precisely what they are doing. Amazon is an umbrella company with many business operating underneath it. Their app store is just another vertical like AWS is separate from the retail site. If they choose to stop offering a service, that's their prerogative.
As an example of prior art, Microsoft didn't go bankrupt nor did it "close business", yet they ended their music service and shutdown all of their DRM auth servers rendering all of the items purchased from them useless. This is the same thing.
If they'd gone bankrupt, the employees had all lost their jobs, the shareholders got wiped out, the CEO's stock options were worthless, and burly men were carting the office's aeron chairs to the auction house - that would be a different matter.
Wiping out customers' purchases when you've got $100 billion in the bank, though? Kinda a dick move.
Ha! The thought of Amazon splurging for aeron chairs for it's workforce made me chuckle
those brown plastic folding chairs or a concrete bench is what i'd reckon.
> Wiping out customers' purchases when you've got $100 billion in the bank, though? Kinda a dick move.
What you call a dick move might actually have made sense financially for a business. If MS Music was losing money with no hopes of ever turning a profit, why should they continue to operate a charity music service subsidized by all of the other MS businesses that are making money?
Same thing for Amazon. If it is something that shows no signs of paying for itself, why continue to operate it? You have to stop the bleeding at some point. What was the attraction to a dev to use Amazon over Google? Lower percentage of the take? Maybe that explains why it was a money loser?
At the end of the day, it was a bet on a losing horse.
> If MS Music was losing money with no hopes of ever turning a profit, why should they continue to operate a charity music service subsidized by all of the other MS businesses that are making money?
Microsoft could make a deal with, say, Apple. They check each Microsoft Music (Xbox Music? Zune Music?) account for total spend, and give people an iTunes gift card for nearest total amount. Negotiate a bulk pricing deal with Apple.
Microsoft gets to look good, Apple gets to look good. But it'd cost 0.001% of total Microsoft profit and the shareholders can't have that.
Compare that to some other businesses that will happily recommend you to a competitor if it is a better fit, or if they shut down go out of their way to write a tool or help you with off- and onboarding to an alternative.
Exactly.
When Google shut down Stadia they refunded all purchases - both games and hardware.
google needs that good will for how many of their products they nuke
> What you call a dick move might actually have made sense financially for a business.
Of course it makes financial sense for the business. Taking the customer's money and not delivering the promised product is really profitable, if you can get away with it.
Still a dick move though.
Theft is often a smart business move
wage theft is the largest category of theft in the US by total dollar amount. by a rather large margin.
>Amazon
>principles
> After all, earn trust and customer obsession are two of their leadership principles
You missed a "/s" at the end, I guess?
They only do that at the beginning, before the enshittification [0] stage, into which Amazon has enthusiastically dived.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
[0a] awesome there is a Wikipedia page for enshittification; it even has a section specific to Amazon
Does Amazon have something like Google Play Services that will be leaving and break them? Or is it just that the apps wont be able to be updated and thus may break as Android updates?
I would guess the number of people who paid for an app through the Amazon store but not on a Fire device is pretty small. And do you ever really own an app? I have so few that I paid a one time payment for.
They jumped through some pretty giant hoops to make their play services "drop in" replacement, but idk if that's just for fire tablets or if it gets installed on Android too.
What giant hoops? I’m interested in reading more
My very basic understanding is:
They wanted android developers that used google play services to basically be able to submit the same app to the amazon/fire store (without major revisions), so they reverse engineered the framework used by Google for api/hooks between the apps/apks and the "play-services"/OS levels.
Sort of spoofed the environment to prioritize compatibility in order to make it as easy as possible to grow the Amazon app store.
People don't realize that despite Android being nominally 'Open Source', the closed source Google layer on most phones makes it very difficult to exclude Google entirely from the picture and have a user friendly phone environment (both end-user and app-developer/playstore-user).
Basically only Amazon and China had resources to counter it directly with Android, or you could drop that layer and go the less user friendly route of st like AOSP 'pure' phones.
As an app developer, I'm looking forward to having to answer all the emails asking for me to transfer their purchases to Google Play.
Do free promotions (https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...) still work ? And how would you even validate the emails against Amazon Appstore purchases?
I'd assume they would have a record of the user in their database. How else would they earn money from the data harvesting their app is a cover for? For the small number of apps that aren't solely data harvesting, surely they still have records of their users in a database as well? This question almost reads as if you're assuming the only record of an app would be through the store and not by the app developers themselves. I would find that truly shocking and quite comically sad if true.
It seems like it would be trivial for a user to login to the app acquired from a different store to be able to display a "welcome back" or even something along the lines of a "restore purchases" type of thing.
This can't be reinventing the wheel kind of a thing.
In google play the purchaser information is mostly privatized and hidden from the developer. I assume Amazon is the same.
The only way a developer would know a person is an existing user is if they have a user sign up process inside the app itself.
Using android.content.SharedPreferences, set one singaling the user purchased a license from the Amazon copy of the app, read it from the Google Play app.
It is doable, the main issues is: 1. Getting users to redownload the app from the Play store 2. Maintaining this registration transfer mechanism
I think issue #1 is a big one, how to download a paid app without paying for it? Not everything is freemium.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon was a good example of me paying on one platform, and then applying the upgrade to the free app after downloading on another.
That's on the dev of the app. They should absolutely have the ability to see that you download the app, and allow full access again.
This isn't any different from a user switching to a new device and having to download apps again. Not everyone restores from backup and prefers clean installs. Downloading an app again should not be the point of friction
Is there a major barrier to just doing it for all your paid purchases?
The major barrier is that I have no idea who my paid purchasers are.
out of curiousity, how do you know that google is paying you the correct amount?
What I actually get: a list of completely anonymized per-transaction data that contains the country in which the purchase was made, the time and date, the currency in which the transaction was made, and the .. something to do with exchange rate, and... about 12 columns of data in total, none of which remotely resemble an email or a credit card number or a globally unique account ID. Actually, multiple records for each transaction -- there's a separate record for various stages of clearing of the payment (or failure to clear as the case may be).
I suppose I could analyze that data, although I can't think of an actual good reason to do so. I have no idea whether those records are real or fabricated. So no real way to verify that google is paying me the correct amount. Since you asked.
> If there are no options for a refund, then this is another reason not to purchase items that you never truly own.
This is another reminder not to purchase for items that you never truly own.
you don't truly own land in the US, so i guess no houses.
Move fast and break (your) things.
Not that it's okay, but App Store/Play Store do the same. They don't refund for apps that have become unavailable.
This is different though, isn’t it? Amazon still exists. The whole platform is shutting down. Individual devs aren’t taking down their apps.
I had a Google Play app whose dev died. It was just a simple local app -- no network server usage. When I last upgraded my phone (due to imminent failure of the previous one) it refused to copy the app over -- and the app was no longer in the Play store.
I still have the APK for one called "Backitude" and have kept migrating it for years since the disappearance of the developer.
It's nothing special, just a location tracker that logs to a file every so often based on time and/or distance moved (could also ping a URL with encoded location info instead). Basically the underlying data for location history without relying on Google. Its notable feature years ago was that it would do location 'steals' - instead of just triggering a then-expensive location check, it would grab the most current available location info as triggered by some other application and only force an update if that information was too old.
a more distant example is VLC on apple devices. I don't remember what happened anymore and any guesses would be speculation, but at one point on iphones you could not get VLC unless you had already gotten VLC.
More evidence of the sad state of general purpose computing
The Amazon store will remain open for Fire tablets if I'm reading right, and those are AOSP-based. So it's kind of similar. Again, not that I'm fine with it, but that I think it's technically not unprecedented.
It's not even remotely similar. The app store vanishes from your phone, with no recourse.
Don't make excuses for Amazon, please.
I thought most apps sell per-year subscriptions that then expire. Isn't that correct?
I don't know if it's "most" but there are (still) a lot of apps with one-time purchase. You never saw that in an Appstore?
THE top paid app in iOS App Store where I am (which isn't US nor EU) was an ad blocker built by one guy, for past two straight years. I think it's an unspoken open secret that App Store has been dead for a while, with apps that use App Store as mere payment processor e.g. freemium lootbox and subscription apps, notwithstanding.
I bought quite a few around 2012, sure, but it tapered off. I don't think I've bought any apps as one-time purchases in the past five years, it's all yearly subscriptions now. All the ones I see on my main phone screen right now are subscription-based or free.
What are some well-known apps sold as one-time purchases now?
Looking in the Play Store at "Top Paid" seems like a bunch of one-time purchases listed. I think a lot of it may be a difference between Android and iOS - Apple software seems to have a lot more subscriptions, but that's just an anecdata 'feel'.
My 100% subscriptions in the past years is on Android, actually.
What I've heard is that one-time purchases lead to a lack of income after three years, when people expect upgrades. That's not a problem for app developers who don't plan to do any upgrades, of course.
i dunno well known but Symfonium, a subsonic client for android is a one time purchase of $5 or so. Some games by decent developers are a single purchase, but i can't recall any offhand. Most games are freemium and there's a really bad discovery process, so i just don't play games on my phone.
i'm not in the habit of buying apps anymore. I did drop a lot of money on the wolfram alpha iOS app when it first launched (it was over $50 at the time iirc, but to hedge i'll say "adjusted for inflation")
There's not many things digital that are going to have a half-life the length of your lifetime.
There are. Anything that is a file in an open format will outlive me (given minimal care in terms of backups). My family photos, my markdown notes, non-DRM music and ebooks, proper applications. I’d say it’s all digital things, except for a small enshittified sliver.
Renting, however, does not work that way. Any DRM-protected download is a rental. Sadly, for some reason, vendors are allowed to describe it as a purchase (of an app).
I don’t know why you are giving up.
> My family photos, my markdown notes, non-DRM music and ebooks, proper applications.
There's no guarantee you'll be able to easily use an ebook in today's formats 50 years from now.
Same for applications.
You're really that confident in 50 years you'll be able to easily run x86 applications written for Windows or Mac?
I would happily bet that 50 years from now, so long as you've preserved the bytes accurately, it will remain possible to open DRM-free PDF/A files, epubs, MP3s, JPEGs, PNGs, CSVs and zip files.
> There's no guarantee you'll be able to easily use an ebook in today's formats 50 years from now.
I have no idea what “easily” means here, but I’m not unique. While these open-format ebooks remain of interest to even a small community, they will remain readable and convertable.
What makes you doubt that?
> You're really that confident in 50 years you'll be able to easily run x86 applications written for Windows or Mac?
Again, I have no idea what “easily” means here. However, my use of “proper” also wasn’t clear (I edited it down from “free software”).
“Proper” certainly implies that their runnability does not depend on the wall clock, or availability of an internet service. Yes, I am confident that I can run such programs in the future, on appropriate hardware.
(Note how the thread is about digital, not physical, things.)
With well defined and documented file formats, and with OSS applications supporting them, they can be read for all eternity.
You don't need binary compatibility. You can load a gif on any computer today, and it's old. I can view aiff image files from my Amiga still.
We're already 50 years in on many formats.
Where it becomes uncertain, it DRM laden, closed source applications with bespoke file formats.
1) Survivorship bias
How many image formats CAN'T you read today that you could read 50 years ago?
2) Images are much much much more ubiquitous than book formats
Parents point is, even if the software to read the format disappears or is much more difficult to run for some reason- if there are published specs, you can recreate it. This is why non proprietary formats are such a great thing.
I would bet that the vast majority if not all image formats that can't be read anymore are due to their spec never being published.
i was going to collate a list, but instead https://www.lemkesoft.info/files/manuals_gc12/GraphicConvert...
That supports 200 image file formats as inputs, and you can then export it to PNG or GIF or BMP.
Your question, on its face, seems ok, but really, there's probably millions of image file formats lost to the sands of time. Shareware image creation programs, tiny fly-by-nite company's software that only ever had one major release (probably some cad formats in there. Those were where i used to always have problems 22 years ago when i did this for work.)
however, at least 200 of them are preserved through that "company's" dedication to this topic.
> Survivorship bias
GIF, JPEG, MP3... these are all patented technologies whose patents have expired into the public domain. That they're still used and useful today is a very strong indication that they'll be available in another 50 years. I think that having public patents for image and audio formats helps to demonstrate that it's more than just survivorship bias.
> How many image formats CAN'T you read today that you could read 50 years ago?
I don’t know. How many?
Do you have any examples of digital media/apps in open formats which are no longer accessible?
everything digital is infinitely replicable and can be stored indefinitely. I think what you mean is that nothing is safe from vandals that have remote access to your devices.
Yeah, don't have high expectations for things you pay for but don't own. It's a sad truth, but I've accepted it (I also bought some dvds in 2024 which is something I never thought I'd do again).
Not sure about DVDs, but CDs weren't designed to last longer than 10 years. Most of my CD collection has physically rotted. Because I was using Windows Media Player and iTunes, I ripped most of collection in M4A format, which, at the time, was better than MP3. A couple of years ago, I decided that I wanted to re-rip my CD collection (some 200 odd CDs) in FLAC format instead of m4a format (don't ask). And some significant portion (50%?) of the new FLAC rips were missing tracks due to physical read errors on the original CD media.
Completely unrelated and misleading comparison. A proper comparison to the issue with apps is if Amazon employee would walk into your house and physically destroyed CDs. CDs rotting is a force of nature, not corporate greed/incompetence.
My 80s CDs are fine. Just played my first CD, Bryan Adams and it sounds like the day I bought it. Maybe your environment or drive are factors?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reckless_(Bryan_Adams_album)
i think various pressing factories had different tolerances for oxygen ingress, which, iirc, the oxidization is what actually kills optical media.
Sucks when you spend money on things and then they are taken away from you, isn't it.
Computer games have a similar problem. There is an EU petition specifically for computer games to stop such practice:
https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home
We need a petition like this for all software.
[flagged]
If I want to spin up a CI/CD pipeline to build an Android app that takes 30 seconds. I send you or anyone else the link and you can test it out.
With Apple I need to beg for my dev account to be approved, pay 100$ a year, and submit it via test flight.
If more than X numbers of people use it , ohh no I have to publish it via the app store. If it pleases King Cook, may I publish a game for my friends to play.
Google is starting to restrict Android too, custom system roms aren't as popular anymore, but theirs still a sense it's my phone.
With Apple, it's still Apple's phone, you've just purchased a revokable license to use it in accordance with the terms you agreed to.
> It's bad enough that I've had at least a dozen apps disappear from my iDevices over the years because the companies running them went out of business, pivoted, exited, or otherwise disappeared or stopped supporting their product. The last thing I want is for an entire app store's worth of apps to suddenly go away.
This happens just the same on iOS when Apple drops support for a device. First-party stores are not a defense against this. It's theoretically easier to plan for, but you're still at the mercy of Apple's support window.
Once upon a time you could download an app and it would work indefinitely, but that's not the way any modern app-store based systems really work. What Amazon is doing here is probably less impactful than when Apple kills certain APIs and breaks a bunch of apps with an update. (I'm certain Amazon and Apple both do estimated math about the number of devices/apps/users they're breaking, and I'm also certain just based on volume that Amazon is breaking fewer people/apps with this change than Apple does routinely.)
It's my understanding that the majority of people who want alternative app stores for iOS don't necessarily want something like an Amazon App Store, but rather something like F-Droid.
I would love to be able to install weird, open source apps on my iPhone, the same way I could on my Android phones.
Totally agree, but unfortunately people (forgive and) forget and that's why those companies keep on doing this.
I myself forgot Microsoft once (cough) sold e-books.
Did Microsoft ever sell directly? They had Microsoft Reader but I thought all the stores were third-party.
However, Amazon did at one point in time sell ebooks in multiple formats pre-Kindle, one of which was Microsoft Reader. (I assume the others were PDF and Mobipocket.) So they have form for closing up shop and killing access to purchases like this.
PlaysForSure was also a great name.
Bonus points if it had been accurate.
I don't follow this logic. Amazon did something bad on their app store so now walled gardens are good?
I don't follow this logic. Amazon did something bad on their app store so now walled gardens are good?
No, the logic is that several large companies (Amazon, Apple, Microsoft) have done bad things on their app store, so no stores can be trusted. But for me, I trust a big name store more than I trust an small unknown store.
I'm not sure what "small unknown" stores you might be referring to. Surely Amazon qualifies as a "big name" store same as Apple or Google, right? Clearly this event shows a big name is not an indication of consumer protection.
Surely Amazon qualifies as a "big name" store same as Apple or Google, right?
Yes. That's why I listed it right next to Apple and Microsoft in my response.
https://www.rif.org
Yeah I read that. Your comment about "small unknown stores" threw me off because none of the parties involved with this story are small so I'm not sure what it has to do with the discussion.
Walled gardens are good because if you insist on picking your fruits only from the wilderness due to moral principles you're gonna get mauled by a bear some time. Sure, you might prioritize feeling morally superior, but the majority of society is more practical
This is an absurd false dichotomy. You can pick fruits from the wilderness and not get mauled by bears. Using apps not in walled gardens has nothing to do with attempts to feel morally superior.
You teach people to stay the hell away from bears, and everyone is better for it.
So the moral here is, only use alternative app stores that are run by companies larger than Amazon?
Isn't the better analogy that you insist on being able to get fruits from anywhere - including neighboring towns or the wild - and not just the local marketplace?
Yeah I could get mauled by a bear if I get my fruits from the wild. But that's probably not a risk with the vendor from a neighboring town.
And if there's a fruit I can only get from the wild, who are you to tell me I can't have it? Maybe I get mauled by a bear. Maybe I get robbed in the neighboring town. But what else am I to do when what I want isn't available at the local marketplace?
Or when Microsoft closed their music store.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_Music
Curious timing, what with the EU DMA opening Play Store to make it easier for people to install it.
Of course, Amazon are subject to the DMA and (I suspect) not overall a fan, so maybe it makes sense for them to not make use of the capabilities it allows?
Did Amazon start a new round of cost cutting, layoffs or something? Yesterday they discontinued Chime. As if Amazon is doubling down on cutting "unnecessary" services
Everyone at Amazon (The only company I have seen using it) hated using Chime, and it wasn't at all on the level of competitors. So I think it was just an unsuccessful product.
Every product has its hate, but everyone is rarely true. Personally (no longer at Amazon) I was impressed by Chime. It was simple, but rock solid, handling large calls well. Teams is still worse for me (>9 people display is bad, even in MS Edge, when on Linux). Zoom has a finicky interface.
Early in the pandemic I had to use many different systems as an academic, when lots of different contacts pivoted online in different ways. Chime was the least of my problems; it just worked when many other systems struggled.
I liked the Chime meeting/calendar integration at Amazon that could ring everyone at the start of the meeting, meaning that most meetings started promptly.
I was also at Amazon (AWS ProServe) we also hated Chime. AWS internally moved to Slack and only used Chime to schedule customer calls.
that's pretty funny. I had no idea Amazon had their own product in this space until my company did an engagement with ProServe.
Slack huddles use chime under the hood.
According to current press releases, the Chime SDK isn't going away just the Chime service sold directly to customers.
> Note: This does not impact the availability of the Amazon Chime SDK service.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/update-...
I could not find a reliable source for this. Got a link?
Right on slack's webpage.
https://slack.com/blog/news/slack-aws-drive-development-agil...
Unofficially, this agreement happened at the same time Amazon started using slack internally
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/business-productivity/customers...
So, what are AWS TAMs going to use to have meetings with customers? Chime was really awful.
First thing I thought of as well. Every time I go to join an AWS call, in my head I'm thinking "oh, right. ugh."
Hopefully they just adopt Zoom and not something even more obscure.
Allegedly, along with Microsoft 365 (my condolences to them) https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-zoom-main-meeting-app...
On the other hand, at Amazon, people I know like Chime. Sad its going away.
i had to use it when amazon was a client of my employer and it was hot garbage in my opinion
AWS (which isn't Amazon, really, even if they share resources), used to bake the cost of keeping the lights on practically forever, or at least until the last user churns. The product may not see improvements if it didn't get traction, but you could bank on being able to use it forever.
When they did decide to kill something, like non-VPC EC2, you'd get the notice a literal decade ahead. For this specific example, sunset started end of '13, with the last instance shut off mid '23.
This all started to change a couple of years ago, when they became much more aggressive with doing the Googles and just killing a thing with a few months of a warning. Pity.
They're also getting rid of the "Download & Transfer via USB" option for Kindle books, which was the last available option for directly removing DRM. But it does also mean that owners of older Kindle devices without WiFI are basically screwed.
I don't know if I'd reach that conclusion because of Chime - there's also Blink & Ring, a lot of overlap and confusion in cameras & security.
Chime is their online meetings app, not their doorbell camera
Ah I was thinking of Ring Chime. (I'm sure there is a third overlapping with Ring & Blink though, can't recall name.)
Thank god chime is gone
All 6 people who used Amazon app store on a non-Fire tablet must be very upset!
I'm one of them. DJI "pro" remotes are Android devices that for some reason are completely un-googled but can run the Amazon app store; if you want to run, say, Litchy on such a device (an alternative to DJI Fly app), Amazon is (was) the only option.
Now there appears to be no option left.
Is sideloading possible?
Yes, kind of, but then maps don't work, and the main function of the app is to program drone missions on a map...
(To be fair, it's possible to program missions on the web and synchronize the account with the app to send the missions on the device; but having no map at all on the device is still a big problem.)
Use Aurora store?
Oh wow! Hopefully DJI will address this.
Now all we need to do is find the OTHER five people. :-P
Couldn't people move over to another app store like F-Droid?
As far as I know:
Most app available on Amazon's app store are already available via Google Play Store anyways. Rather, most developers have deserted the Amazon's store and the versions available there are outdated by years. I noted that Apps Amazon released for their own external or internal events like AWS re:Invent were only available via Google's Play Store and not Amazon's own.
The challenge is that many apps on Amazon's app store are tied to the app store. I once tried disabling Amazon's app store app, and noted that the apps installed stopped working (until the app store was enabled again). My immediate conclusion was that I would not want to rely on these apps or Amazon's app store. The developers may not have any incentive to update their apps versions on Amazon's store to remove the dependence on the latter, and nor they may have any to allow the paid users just install those apps from Google's play store without paying afresh.
F-Droid only accept opensource app.
You can host your own repo (or someone else can) and just add it to the app
Adding a new source for every app becomes tiresome, especially when switching devices.
I do see potential for a closed source repo managed like an app store, but adding a repo for every app adds unnecessary security risks (as the app specific repo can contain any number of apps).
> adding a repo for every app adds unnecessary security risks
Could you speak more to your security concerns about adding repos? To the very best of my knowledge it doesn't auto-download from all the repos, that would be crazy, and it for sure doesn't auto-install from them
Hmm, maybe someone could start a F-Droid repository that accepts nonfree apps from everyone.
They used to give away premium apps like Epic does on PC, so even I have used them.
Speaking of, I recently learned that Epic has started doing that on Android, too, but you have to sideload their .apk because of Google Hate: https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/mobile
I was initially confused because I thought they were just pushing a mobile access pathway for the normal Epic store, and I had no interest in that, but Bloons TD 6 is pretty fun, so I was willing to give it a shot to see what they'll give away next month https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/mobile#:~:text=Free%20Give...
It wasn't just devices running Android natively, if you wanted to run Android apps on Windows you might have used the Amazon Appstore with the Windows Subsystem for Android which Microsoft is discontinuing.
It is likely that Microsoft's decision lead to this.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/android/wsa/
> Amazon Appstore will continue to be available elsewhere, including on Fire TV and Fire Tablet devices.
Well, it'd better continue to be available, seeing that Amazon's devices don't support the Google Play store...
It might not be "supported", but I thought you could easily sideload play store and play services? You don't even need to muck around with rooting or even adb.
I wouldn't call sideloading the play store and services "easy", especially for Kindle Kids/FreeTime profiles.
Not at all easy. It’s a PITA using all sorts of odd sources.
It's literally downloading a few apks and installing them. You don't even need to use adb. You can do it all within the preloaded browser that's on the tablet.
https://www.howtogeek.com/232726/how-to-install-the-google-p...
I don’t remember it being that easy when I did it 3-4 years ago. I was also a bit uncomfortable downloading the google support libraries from APKmirror, as my life is on my google account. IIRC the APKs were unsigned.
> Amazon's devices don't support the Google Play store...
FireOS devices aren't certified by Google and so, they do not come with "Gapps" (including the Play Store) preinstalled. Even if they were, Amazon might have some reservations about preinstalling Gapps (which run with higher than normal privileges), effectively letting Google get hands on its user's purchasing habits.
All that to say, this is a business limitation not a technical one.
See also: Google's iron grip on Android: Controlling open source by any means necessary, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6582494 (2014).
I have two Kindle Fire tablets (they're low-quality as general purpose tablets, but cheap and good for reading comics or books) and both have Google Play on them.
Mind you, I had to sideload it for both of them.
I did that too but it turned out to be just too much trouble. Play store kept trying to update the handful of apps that exist in both Amazon's and Google's ecosystems, and it completely them.
The Amazon Appstore is a steaming puddle of absolute crap for the most part. I have a Fire tablet I play some simple games on, they're all chock-full of ads. Very few mainstream apps are available, though plenty of cheap knockoffs of those apps are. If you want something good, it's easiest to grab the .apk and sideload it. There are ways to install the Play Store but they're likely beyond most of the Fire's userbase. Regular Android users won't notice or miss this nor should they.
If I needed a tablet for anything serious, I'd buy an iPad or Pixel Tablet, both of which come with a real app store.
While this would negatively affect some of the apps I am using, I am overall glad Amazon is closing this. They should close all things they have done that lower the quality bar and more importantly, make sure the leaders in particular learn some hard lessons.
Ah, fond memories of using it on the BraillePlus 18, an old, discontinued Android-based Braille device that, since it didn't have a screen, couldn't be Play certified. Of course this was around Android 4.
This explains why Windows wsa is going away, since it was tied to this.
Just stop giving Amazon money—at this point you can only blame yourself.
I wonder if you could live a week mostly the same way you do now without touching any service that pays Amazon.
The way I look at it is that boycotting Amazon is similar to boycotting petroleum. Petroleum is in the supply chain of everything that we use, but energy companies would definitely feel the impacts of everyone getting EVs.
AWS is everywhere, but Amazon Retail is a separate entity and would definitely feel the crunch of even 30% of its users deciding to shop elsewhere or cancelling Prime.
(I cancelled my Prime membership a year and a half ago and do almost all of my shopping directly from manufacturers or from smaller stores. I spent thousands of dollars per year with them.
I used Walmart Lists to replace my Amazon subscribe and save purchases for a year but was finally able to, mostly, move off of that earlier this year. As it happens, HEB, a grocery chain in Texas, has just about everything I need!
I resisted doing this earlier because I thought I needed one/two-day delivery; I wrote posts on here defending this "need." It turns out that, no, I can wait a few days, and, yes, UPS, USPS, and FedEx are significantly more reliable than Amazon Flex.)
Not disagreeing, but I see a gap between the reason and the means of the boycott.
On petroleum, my main beef is not the chemical but how most behemoths managing the market are screwing with our health and the planet. There is an alternate world where BP is not a bunch of psychopaths and we have stronger environmental regulations.
In that respect, getting electricty from BP instead of oil from BP isn't that much of a difference in my book, I don't believe they manage their solar farm better than their oil tankers.
That's the lens I see for Amazon: if we're pissed at them because they killed their App store, does keeping AWS customers afloat really help on the moral standpoint ?
I know we can't stick on principle on everything, I just see the very point of the boycott to be very blurry and not reaching it's target.
Is that really so hard? I cancelled my Prime subscription years ago and haven't missed it. Walmart, Target, Costco, BestBuy, HomeDepot, etc haven't gone anywhere. Smaller specialty retailers usually sell on their own website with shipping too. Plus, one genuine advantage the other retailers have over Amazon is that you can (usually) trust you're getting something of reasonable quality, whereas Amazon feels like an AI generated flea market filled with garbage quality Aliexpress drop shipping schemes.
I thought losing two day shipping would suck, but it really hasn't. Most of the big retailers (in my area anyways) end up delivering online orders in two days or less anyways, and the delivery fee is free if your order is over a certain size (usually around $35)
De-googling or De-appleing is hard, but De-amazoning (at least for me) was trivial and anticlimactic.
I cancelled my subscription and found I didn't really miss it that much, but could not find a good replacement for semi bulk or bulk purchases. Usually one to one items are priced the same elsewhere. But if I want to buy in bulk I have to go to Costco, but they are only good if I'm fine with anything, but out of luck for specific brands or any item they deem seasonal. They stopped carrying the only lotion I like replacing it with a different brand, the lens cleaners are now terrible, and they haven't had grape seed oil for months.
There used to be a bulk site I was on before COVID, but they were bought and shut down.
> any service that pays Amazon
If we go literal with this, it gets far more complicated counting Amazon web services
It's not reasonable or effective to delve into the private supply chain, IMO. Don't let perfect be the enemy of better.
You're choosing to avoid Amazon on moral principles.
It's kinda relevant that these principles only apply to services that have the Amazon logo, and not where more than half of Amazon's profit is coming from.
Hypothetically you might be bringing more business to Amazon through any of their AWS customers than by buying your USB cables on the storefront.
PS: I don't have a good answer to this, but boycott and "vote with your wallet" kind of actions have became a very complex thing IMHO.
I spend $2/month on AWS and could change this, but use nothing else that I can think of; is this really that hard?
Just stop giving Amazon money—at this point you can only blame yourself.
Done. Mostly.
I dropped Prime last year, and have been surprised by the results.
1. I don't buy a bunch of pointless plastic crap that I don't need anymore. It was the thrill/affirmation/addiction of near-instant gratification delivery that made me buy stuff on impulse.
2. I've saved a bunch of money because of #1.
3. Unless it's same-day delivery, "Prime" delivery is meaningless. Even with Prime, about 80% of my same-day, next-day or second-day deliveries were delayed. A couple of times for a week or more. I can't count the number of times the Amazon.com delivery tracker told me "You're next!" with a little cartoon truck on a map next to my home. Then an hour later, "We're doing a few more deliveries first." And then "Delivery date unknown."
I do still occasionally buy from Amazon, when there's something I can't get locally. But without the instant gratification, I buy much less. And sometimes the things I do buy arrive with the same speed of Prime delivery anyway.
So you've pretty much dropped Amazon the ecommerce store/platform. But what about any online services you consume? So many things online these days have some amount of AWS hosting involved.
I can only control my actions. I cannot control what other people do.
I fully agree. Just pointing out other things to think about when trying to avoid Amazon. Good luck on your journey.
If I need to to buy electronics here in Italy I either go on aliexpress (and goodbye warranty) or Amazon. There’s no Best Buy or Newegg here to go to
Would Euronics work for you?
https://www.euronics.it/
feels like you've identified a market for a Italian Newegg....
My bet is that Amazon is working on a new OS that's not compatible with Android
Or is it the other way around: they're giving up on "FireOS" and just going to let Google do the work?
Good idea. Most people would probably be happier on a more stock Android with the Google Play Store.
my bet is they fired a few too people and now maintaining it is a burden
Big news if fifteen years ago
Why would they?
Full chain control, I suppose, there are rumours about Vega OS. https://www.androidauthority.com/android-14-based-fire-tvs-3...
If that's the case, it's a bad idea, Amazon is not prepared to maintain their own OS.
they'd probably be better off setting a pile of money on fire instead
At this rate, in a year of two, Amazon will have a reputation for killing products just like Google. It was Chime yesterday and now this.
Personally I still haven't gotten over Amazon's killing of the magazine subscription service.
Funnily enough I installed this recently to install a game I bought years ago.
I tried searching for it and found several outright scam apps. I figured Amazon had given up with it.
But Java doesn't even have union types
Stopped "purchasing" from them after i found out they wrapped their whole Store crap around apps and repackaged them.
I didnt even know this existed.
Is amazon essentially going through a firing spree? Between rto friction and dropping stuff it looks like it wants to shed a lot of people from its payroll.
Not a problem for me, I only took the free apps from Amazon's store. If the same app was available on Play, I bought it there. It never made sense to me to pay for an app that was not on the native appstore and while I do have a Fire tablet and multiple FireTV Cubes, I was always more vested into the non-Amazon side of Android for phones.
What took them so long
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https://www.failory.com/amazon