A smartphone can pack the latest and greatest hardware and have the most exciting features, but if it lacks an ecosystem, it will be a hard sell to a customer. After all, most of our smartphone experiences comes from the variety of apps we download to it, so if a smartphone platform has little to no apps, it’ll be hard to truly appreciate what the phone has to offer. Apparently that is something Amazon is hoping to avoid. The company has recently announced their first Android smartphone, the Amazon Fire. The phone comes with some pretty impressive hardware and features that you won’t find on other Android smartphones, but will it be enough to ship 2-3 million units as predicted by Amazon?
Amazon is offering Android developers up to $15,000 in Amazon Coins digital currency to attract more apps to the Amazon Appstore for its upcoming Fire smartphone, which the company announced earlier this week. Of course, there are a few catches before developers can get their hands on all that digital cash. Amazon is offering 500,000 coins (equivalent to $5,000) for each app developers submit to the Appstore. Developers can then use those coins to provide incentives for customers who purchase their app or in-app-purchases, such as rebates on purchases, or incentives for completing achievements. But developers won’t be getting Amazon’s free money without a little work. Apps will need to take advantage of some Fire-only features in order to qualify for Amazon’s bounty. The move is a clear attempt to try and shore up some of the Fire’s shortcomings out of the gate: a lack of third-party app support compared to the Google Play Store and iOS App Store, and a potential lack of apps that take advantage of the phone’s unique features.
