Amazon Appstore

History

The Amazon Appstore launched on March 22, 2011 and was made available in nearly 200 countries. Developers are paid 70% of the list price of the app or in-app purchase. Notable features that were included on launch included a "Free App of the Day" promotion, which offered different paid apps at no charge daily, and "Test Drive", which allowed users to demo apps in a web browser using an Adobe Flash client virtualized Android instance running on Amazon EC2.

In September 2011, Amazon announced the Amazon Fire tablet, which uses Amazon Appstore as its main source of apps. Ahead of the official release of Fire, Appstore was updated to include parental controls, a manager for subscriptions, and UI updates to adhere to the Fire's Android user interface.

In May 2013, Amazon introduced Amazon Coins as a form of payment for purchasing apps, games, and in-app purchases from the store. In August 2013, Amazon Appstore added support for HTML5 web apps.

The Test Drive feature was decommissioned in April 2015; Amazon stated that the service had been in decline, partly due to many apps not supporting the feature, and the increasing prevalence of the free-to-play business model making it obsolete.

In August 2015, Amazon Appstore replaced its daily free app program with "Actually Free", which was modeled after the Kindle Unlimited program. Apps in the program were offered at no charge to users, with Amazon paying revenue to developers based on per-minute usage of the apps by end-users. By contrast, developers did not receive any revenue for apps offered under the previous free app promotions. The "Actually Free" collection was accessible via a section of Amazon Appstore on Fire OS, but required users to download the separate "Amazon Underground" app (a version of the main Amazon retail app that integrated Appstore) on other Android devices.

In August 2017, Amazon announced that the Actually Free program would be discontinued, citing other monetization options such as Coins and Merch on Demand. The shutdown occurred in phases, with the program ending in 2019.

On March 5, 2024, Amazon and Microsoft announced deprecation of Windows Subsystem for Android, which allowed installation of Android apps on Windows 11. The companies immediately restricted new installations of Amazon Appstore and other apps on Windows 11, but pledged to continue serving updates for existing installations until March 5, 2025.

On February 20, 2025, Amazon updated its support pages to announce that Amazon Appstore for Android will cease to function on August 20, 2025.

Amazon Appstore has also been adopted by several operating systems as a source of Android-compatible software, in lieu of Google Play. In June 2014, BlackBerry Limited announced that it would add Amazon Appstore to BlackBerry 10 (which is based on real-time operating system QNX) beginning with version 10.3 for use with its Android runtime.

In June 2021, Microsoft announced that Amazon Appstore would be offered via Microsoft Store on Windows 11, for use with Windows Subsystem for Android. On March 5, 2024, Microsoft announced deprecation of WSA with support ending on March 5, 2025. As a result, support for the Amazon Appstore on Windows and apps installed from it would also end on March 5, 2025.