We’ve said this time and time again, and we’ll say it once more: 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?
Well in a bid to attract more users onto their devices, Amazon will begin by attracting more developers to help develop apps that are optimized for the Amazon Fire. As you know, the Amazon Fire runs a forked version of Android, so what might work for stock Android might not necessarily play nicely with a forked version. Amazon has announced that they will be offering up to $15,000 per developer to submit apps that have been optimized for the phone.
Every app that has been successfully qualified will be given 500,000 Amazon Coins which is worth $5,000, and each developer has the chance to be awarded the maximum of 3 times, totaling it to $15,000. Of course there are certain rules and criteria that the apps have to meet, so if you’re interested in checking out the rules, you can head on over to Amazon’s website for the details.
As it stands, the Amazon Appstore is home to about 240,000 Android apps. That is by no means a small number, although we’re guessing that most of these apps won’t be optimized for the Android Fire, which is something that Amazon needs to address ASAP.