The Amazon Appstore for Android devices will be discontinued on August 20, 2025

[SapporoChris]

"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.

[malfist]

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

[mattmaroon]

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.

[shimfish]

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.

[WhyNotHugo]

> 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.

[beardyw]

Move fast and break (your) things.

[numpad0]

Not that it's okay, but App Store/Play Store do the same. They don't refund for apps that have become unavailable.

[beretguy]

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.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

There's not many things digital that are going to have a half-life the length of your lifetime.

[eschulz]

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).

[andrewaylett]

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?

[rs186]

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

[specialp]

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.

[snotrockets]

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.

[ravenstine]

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.

[OJFord]

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.

[shepherdjerred]

Thank god chime is gone

[mattmaroon]

All 6 people who used Amazon app store on a non-Fire tablet must be very upset!

[bambax]

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.

[eek2121]

They used to give away premium apps like Epic does on PC, so even I have used them.

[matt_heimer]

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/

[david_allison]

> Amazon Appstore will continue to be available elsewhere, including on Fire TV and Fire Tablet devices.

[rob74]

Well, it'd better continue to be available, seeing that Amazon's devices don't support the Google Play store...

[alok-g]

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.

[TomMasz]

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.

[devinprater]

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.

[portaouflop]

Just stop giving Amazon money—at this point you can only blame yourself.

[reaperducer]

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.

[makeitdouble]

I wonder if you could live a week mostly the same way you do now without touching any service that pays Amazon.

[sirjaz]

This explains why Windows wsa is going away, since it was tied to this.

[develoopest]

My bet is that Amazon is working on a new OS that's not compatible with Android

[jfengel]

Or is it the other way around: they're giving up on "FireOS" and just going to let Google do the work?

[agos]

my bet is they fired a few too people and now maintaining it is a burden

[Apocryphon]

Big news if fifteen years ago

[Hackbraten]

Why would they?

[micromacrofoot]

they'd probably be better off setting a pile of money on fire instead

[kccqzy]

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.

[BuckRogers]

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.

[jjbinx007]

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.

[znpy]

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.

[yobid20]

I didnt even know this existed.

[dvh]

But Java doesn't even have union types

[powerofmAnNnyYy]

Stopped "purchasing" from them after i found out they wrapped their whole Store crap around apps and repackaged them.

[yapyap]

What took them so long

[belter]

https://www.failory.com/amazon