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

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

#121

Post by michaelt »

dylan604 wrote: post #106
malfist wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

When you say isn't closing business, that's precisely what they are doing. Amazon is an umbrella company with many business operating underneath it. Their app store is just another vertical like AWS is separate from the retail site. If they choose to stop offering a service, that's their prerogative. As an example of prior art, Microsoft didn't go bankrupt nor did it "close business", yet they ended their music servi…

If they'd gone bankrupt, the employees had all lost their jobs, the shareholders got wiped out, the CEO's stock options were worthless, and burly men were carting the office's aeron chairs to the auction house - that would be a different matter.

Wiping out customers' purchases when you've got $100 billion in the bank, though? Kinda a dick move.

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

#122

Post by vel0city »

reaperducer wrote: post #42
portaouflop wrote: post #16

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

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 delive…

So you've pretty much dropped Amazon the ecommerce store/platform. But what about any online services you consume? So many things online these days have some amount of AWS hosting involved.

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

#123

Post by bogwog »

makeitdouble wrote: post #72
portaouflop wrote: post #16

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

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

Is that really so hard? I cancelled my Prime subscription years ago and haven't missed it. Walmart, Target, Costco, BestBuy, HomeDepot, etc haven't gone anywhere. Smaller specialty retailers usually sell on their own website with shipping too. Plus, one genuine advantage the other retailers have over Amazon is that you can (usually) trust you're getting something of reasonable quality, whereas Amazon feels like an AI generated flea market filled with garbage quality Aliexpress drop shipping schemes.

I thought losing two day shipping would suck, but it really hasn't. Most of the big retailers (in my area anyways) end up delivering online orders in two days or less anyways, and the delivery fee is free if your order is over a certain size (usually around $35)

De-googling or De-appleing is hard, but De-amazoning (at least for me) was trivial and anticlimactic.

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

#124

Post by michaelt »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #111
akho wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are. Anything that is a file in an open format will outlive me (given minimal care in terms of backups). My family photos, my markdown notes, non-DRM music and ebooks, proper applications. I’d say it’s all digital things, except for a small enshittified sliver. Renting, however, does not work that way. Any DRM-protected download is a rental. Sadly, for some reason, vendors are allowed to describe it as a purcha…

> My family photos, my markdown notes, non-DRM music and ebooks, proper applications. There's no guarantee you'll be able to easily use an ebook in today's formats 50 years from now. Same for applications. You're really that confident in 50 years you'll be able to easily run x86 applications written for Windows or Mac?

I would happily bet that 50 years from now, so long as you've preserved the bytes accurately, it will remain possible to open DRM-free PDF/A files, epubs, MP3s, JPEGs, PNGs, CSVs and zip files.

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

#125

Post by malfist »

michaelt wrote: post #121
dylan604 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say isn't closing business, that's precisely what they are doing. Amazon is an umbrella company with many business operating underneath it. Their app store is just another vertical like AWS is separate from the retail site. If they choose to stop offering a service, that's their prerogative. As an example of prior art, Microsoft didn't go bankrupt nor did it "close business", yet they ended their music servi…

If they'd gone bankrupt, the employees had all lost their jobs, the shareholders got wiped out, the CEO's stock options were worthless, and burly men were carting the office's aeron chairs to the auction house - that would be a different matter. Wiping out customers' purchases when you've got $100 billion in the bank, though? Kinda a dick move.

Ha! The thought of Amazon splurging for aeron chairs for it's workforce made me chuckle

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

#126

Post by jasonjmcghee »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #118
b112 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With well defined and documented file formats, and with OSS applications supporting them, they can be read for all eternity. You don't need binary compatibility. You can load a gif on any computer today, and it's old. I can view aiff image files from my Amiga still. We're already 50 years in on many formats. Where it becomes uncertain, it DRM laden, closed source applications with bespoke file formats.

1) Survivorship bias How many image formats CAN'T you read today that you could read 50 years ago? 2) Images are much much much more ubiquitous than book formats

Parents point is, even if the software to read the format disappears or is much more difficult to run for some reason- if there are published specs, you can recreate it. This is why non proprietary formats are such a great thing.

I would bet that the vast majority if not all image formats that can't be read anymore are due to their spec never being published.

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

#127

Post by develoopest »

bogwog wrote: post #123
makeitdouble wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is that really so hard? I cancelled my Prime subscription years ago and haven't missed it. Walmart, Target, Costco, BestBuy, HomeDepot, etc haven't gone anywhere. Smaller specialty retailers usually sell on their own website with shipping too. Plus, one genuine advantage the other retailers have over Amazon is that you can (usually) trust you're getting something of reasonable quality, whereas Amazon feels like an AI…

> any service that pays Amazon

If we go literal with this, it gets far more complicated counting Amazon web services

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

#128

Post by dylan604 »

michaelt wrote: post #121
dylan604 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say isn't closing business, that's precisely what they are doing. Amazon is an umbrella company with many business operating underneath it. Their app store is just another vertical like AWS is separate from the retail site. If they choose to stop offering a service, that's their prerogative. As an example of prior art, Microsoft didn't go bankrupt nor did it "close business", yet they ended their music servi…

If they'd gone bankrupt, the employees had all lost their jobs, the shareholders got wiped out, the CEO's stock options were worthless, and burly men were carting the office's aeron chairs to the auction house - that would be a different matter. Wiping out customers' purchases when you've got $100 billion in the bank, though? Kinda a dick move.

> Wiping out customers' purchases when you've got $100 billion in the bank, though? Kinda a dick move.

What you call a dick move might actually have made sense financially for a business. If MS Music was losing money with no hopes of ever turning a profit, why should they continue to operate a charity music service subsidized by all of the other MS businesses that are making money?

Same thing for Amazon. If it is something that shows no signs of paying for itself, why continue to operate it? You have to stop the bleeding at some point. What was the attraction to a dev to use Amazon over Google? Lower percentage of the take? Maybe that explains why it was a money loser?

At the end of the day, it was a bet on a losing horse.

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

#129

Post by rerdavies »

terminalbraid wrote: post #90
shimfish wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is there a major barrier to just doing it for all your paid purchases?

The major barrier is that I have no idea who my paid purchasers are.

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

#130

Post by michaelt »

dylan604 wrote: post #128
michaelt wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they'd gone bankrupt, the employees had all lost their jobs, the shareholders got wiped out, the CEO's stock options were worthless, and burly men were carting the office's aeron chairs to the auction house - that would be a different matter. Wiping out customers' purchases when you've got $100 billion in the bank, though? Kinda a dick move.

> Wiping out customers' purchases when you've got $100 billion in the bank, though? Kinda a dick move. What you call a dick move might actually have made sense financially for a business. If MS Music was losing money with no hopes of ever turning a profit, why should they continue to operate a charity music service subsidized by all of the other MS businesses that are making money? Same thing for Amazon. If it is som…

> What you call a dick move might actually have made sense financially for a business.

Of course it makes financial sense for the business. Taking the customer's money and not delivering the promised product is really profitable, if you can get away with it.

Still a dick move though.

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