Amazon Appstore vs Android Market

Amazon has recently announced the launch of Amazon Appstore for Android. The appstore currently features about 3800 apps and will add many more in coming days. We compare Amazon Appstore to the Android market to see what all are the basic differences in between these two Android app stores.

The Amazon Appstore is a far more versatile online shopping experience, but then that’s not entirely surprising when you consider selling stuff online is just what Amazon does best, Google has other things to do so its provision of the Android Market is basic but it gets the job done.

Amazon's Appstore has a good level of detail and a range of options in how you find what you’re looking for. Each app you click on has information on download restrictions, release date, average customer ratings and sales ranking. Then there’s the more technical side of things including file size, version, permissions the app needs on your phone and the minimum operating system version required.

Anyone who uses the regular Amazon site will be familiar with the overall layout of the product pages and there’s also the same customer review section at the bottom of the page which, as always with customer reviews on the web, can be a bit of a mixed bag in terms of usefulness.

Navigation is well catered for on Amazon, there’s an extensive range of categories and sub-categories to narrow down your search, as well as specific sections for best sellers, top rated, new releases, free titles and special deals.

The deals feature is a plus point Amazon has over Android Market, there are timed periodic deals, such as a ‘deal of the day’ with a ticking clock showing how long is left, these reductions are usually quite substantial and sometimes include titles which are free for the duration of the deal. It’s a relatively new dimension of online distribution seen in a few places elsewhere such as Valve’s Steam sales, but it’s good that Amazon have latched onto it as a technique for selling apps and we can see it becoming quite a draw for regular deal hunters.

There’s also a featured developers tab with specific approved developers listed such as Gameloft and Adobe, clicking on these will take you to a list of apps from the particular developer. It’s a nice feature which isn’t present on Android Market and you also get the reassurance that these developers have been ‘approved’ by Amazon.

Android Market is a much simpler affair which is in keeping with Google’s style, it’s also integrated nicely with Google’s ‘hub’ of Gmail, Reader, Calendar, Documents and so on. There are only three tabs at the top of the page for Featured, Top Paid and Top Free, then there are the main categories down the left-hand side – there are only two main ones, these being Games and Applications but each has their various subcategories underneath, such as Racing and Arcade under Games, and Entertainment and Finance for Applications. Clicking on an App reveals one of Android Market’s major strengths, the depth of the detail and the slick presentation.

The product pages are clean and wonderfully simple, again in that signature Google minimalist style. You’re presented with a product page with four tabs at the top and a nice illustrative screenshot or logo image, the contents of the various tabs are presented below the main image, in the default Overview tab there’s a quick bit of description blurb which is nicely succinct and there’s a link to the developer’s website together with screenshots, embedded video footage of the app in action and a few quick user review excerpts.

<< Previous 1 2 Next>>