Amazon Launches Android AppStore In India

E-commerce leader Amazon has enabled its AppStore for Android users in India, according to various media reports.

Amazon's AppStore has over one lakh apps and is offering one paid app for free daily. Users will need to register for Amazon.com before downloading the app. Like Apple's AppStore, users will also need to add their credit card information before accessing the app store. On the other hand, Google's Android market, which comes loaded with all Android OS-based phones, does not require this information and only asks for it when you download a paid app. This could be a make or break for Amazon's AppStore in India, where credit card usage is still low. By restricting access to free apps, we doubt Amazon will see much traction for its app store unless it offers a huge USP.

According to a report by mobile market intelligence firm Research2Guidance, Google's Android Market crossed six billion downloads in August. It also states that as of the end of August 2011, the Android Market contained 277,252 apps and on average, weather apps generated the highest total revenue from paid downloads.

AppStore has also been launched in Europe and Australia.

AWS

For enterprises, Amazon Web Services recently rolled out three new services - Virtual Private Cloud; Direct Connect that allows enterprises to establish a dedicated network connection from their data centre or office to AWS; and Identity and Access Management for managing users and user permissions. It is now engaging with its Indian partners to grow its market, CRN reported.

Previous launches by AWS include Mechanical Turk – a market where businesses can find developers; Elastic Compute Cloud, that can be used to obtain and configure cloud-based computing resources and its Simple Storage Service for storing and retrieving data from the cloud infrastructure.

Amazon's development centre in Bangalore is responsible for developing and launching such similar services as well as affiliate marketing programs and runs the Sponsored Links program for Amazon.com.