"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.
After all, earn trust and customer obsession are two of their leadership principles
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
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.
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.
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?
It also lacks a dozen side services I don’t use. If you’re all in on Amazon Music, that’d be a con.
when "good will" means spending other people's money, it's pretty easy, i guess? something infrastructure development something
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.
Wiping out customers' purchases when you've got $100 billion in the bank, though? Kinda a dick move.
>principles
You missed a "/s" at the end, I guess?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
[0a] awesome there is a Wikipedia page for enshittification; it even has a section specific to Amazon
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.
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.
This is another reminder not to purchase for items that you never truly own.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
> Note: This does not impact the availability of the Amazon Chime SDK service.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/update-...
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.
Now there appears to be no option left.
(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.
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 is likely that Microsoft's decision lead to this.
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).
Mind you, I had to sideload it for both of them.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
There used to be a bulk site I was on before COVID, but they were bought and shut down.
If we go literal with this, it gets far more complicated counting Amazon web services
If that's the case, it's a bad idea, Amazon is not prepared to maintain their own OS.
Personally I still haven't gotten over Amazon's killing of the magazine subscription service.
I tried searching for it and found several outright scam apps. I figured Amazon had given up with it.
