by Bilal Iqbal
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Who doesn’t like free apps on their phone. The Apple App Store and Google’s Android Market (now called the Play Store) used to hold regular sales to commemorate milestones. X numbers of downloads reached: 90% off on some of the best and most popular apps on sale right now. It’s the birthday of something that we did: no need to pay 15 dollars for that app you’ve been wanting to get for the past many months, here have it for 25 cents.
But as Android and iOS become ubiquitous, having reached most of the reasonable milestones there were to reach, such extreme sales have all but ended. You may find individual companies putting their apps on regular sales, but they never come close to the kind of massive discounts of the past.
The Apple App Store was first launched in July 2008. Android Market made its way to handsets in October 2008. It’s been six years. They have matured. It would seem they no longer need to rely on flash sales to drive visits or attract customers to their respective platforms.
Enter the relatively speaking little-known Amazon Appstore for Android, which launched in 2011. It has already been in the market for some three years now and seems intent on gaining the prime spot. The store takes some effort to install on your phone, but is well worth it: you will be rewarded for your troubles in the form of a free paid app daily. Yes, daily. You don’t have to wait for a 6-monthly flash sale. You don’t have to pay a single dirham. Just download it, register for an Amazon account and you are good to go. Every day, you will get a paid app to download for free.
Sure it does not have the number of apps that Play Store and App Store boast of (1.3 million each), but at 240,000 apps and growing, The Amazon Appstore should give you access to most of the important apps that are available elsewhere. Amazon also offers frequent flash giveaways, as if to make up for the five minutes it took you to get it installed. Only last week, the Amazon Appstore was giving away around QR500 worth of free apps, including a dictionary worth 60 dollars (QR220), an office suite, Swype Keyboard, a bunch of games and utility apps. But lest you think such a sale is rarity, Amazon had a similar offer going on in July, where they were give away 100 dollars (about QR400) worth of software away for free.
The first time the app loads it takes you through a simple registration process (assuming you don’t already have an Amazon account). Subsequent startups present the neatly laid out home screen to you, with the day’s free app sitting on top and centre in a carousel that acts as your shortcut to featured apps and categories for the day. Below the carousel is another Featured Apps and Games section, sort of like Editor’s Choice on Play Store. Scrolling up you will be able to find all the usual options such as Top Free Apps and Top Paid Apps from which to choose. Tapping the menu on the top left will present to you a variety of options: New Releases, Top Charts, Games, Recommended for You, Categories – in short, it is the full experience that you would expect from a modern app store. In my use, I found it to be fluid and bug-free.
The biggest thing that the Amazon Appstore has going for it right now is the daily free app option, and since it is the main differentiator it has from the preinstalled Play Store on Android, I do not expect the offers to die out any time soon. And with potentially 365 paid apps including games to choose from in a year, there is no reason not to get it. After all, who doesn’t like free apps on their phone.
l The author may be contacted at techknowbeat@outlook.com or followed on Twitter at @tknobeat