Amazon launches Appstore with Angry Birds Rio and gets sued by Apple

Looks like previous reports about the Amazon Appstore launching today were right. The Amazon Appstore is now for folks in the US, and offers 3,800 apps at the moment. The latest version of the addictive pig-smashing game, Angry Birds Rio was also released today with the Appstore. Being an Amazon-only exclusive app at the moment, it should draw loads of folks over to their service just to check it out – especially since they’ll be giving it away for free today. In addition to Angry Brids Rio, Amazon will also be giving away a free app daily, which helps to promote discoverability of unknown apps that deserve the attention. The online store when visited from a computer also gives users the change to try apps for 30 minutes via an online Android emulator to help users decide if they want to purchase it or not, a feature that puts it one up above the Android Market. Putting a damper on the good news, it was also recently reported that Apple has taken Amazon to court for naming their app store “Appstore.” What comes out of this, we’ll have to see, but for those of you interested in checking out the Amazon Appstore, head to http://www.amazon.com/appstore.