We’ve seen the Kindle Fire, The Kindle Fire HDX and Fire TV, now it’s time for Amazon to unveil it’s smartphone in the Kindle Fire line. The phone has been a few years in the making, with rumors starting back in 2011 that Amazon may make it’s own smart phone to supply customers, already in the Amazon ecosystem with another piece of hardware for media consumption.
The phone seemed like the most logical play three years ago, ahead of rumors about what was to become the Amazon Kindle Fire line of tablets.
Those tablets and the Amazon set top box are all powered with Android in the background and their own proprietary software on top. It’s believed that the smartphone, will also have a similar operating system.
Amazon issued invites to a press event slated for tomorrow, which is when the world is expecting the announcement of Amazon’s phone.
The company has been hard at work preparing for the debut of a smart device that fits in customers’ pockets. Last week the company unveiled Prime Music a streaming music service for it’s Amazon Prime customers. Those customers pay $99 per year (up from $79 last year) to get access to Amazon Prime’s library of media, a lending library of Amazon books and shopping perks like free two day shipping and deeply discounted overnight shipping. The music play is said to be a big part of tomorrow’s announcement.
Yesterday, Amazon announced that their app store is now up to 240,000 apps. Amazon customers can side load Android apps from the Google Play store with just a little technical knowledge.
240,000 doesn’t seem like a lot of apps when Apple and Google are constantly touting millions of apps, but it is significant for the launch of a new smartphone.
Not only that but developers on the Amazon platform are making “as much money” as developers on other operating systems, according to an Amazon press release.
“Developers tell us that they experience improved reach, greater monetization, and, oftentimes, higher revenue when they have their apps and games in the Amazon Appstore,” said Mike George, Vice President of Amazon Appstore and Games. “But this is just the beginning—we’re building more services and capabilities for developers and more Android-based APIs based on their feedback. Most Android apps just work on Kindle Fire, and with an Appstore made for Android devices, Amazon’s Appstore can help developers distribute their apps on Android devices all over the world. It’s a great time for developers to bring their apps to the Amazon Appstore.”
Amazon developers are able to use the robust Amazon Web Services which is the only hosting and cloud based service that already hosts the backend for hundreds of thousands of apps.
While we’re all pretty confident that Amazon’s smartphone will be released tomorrow we still need to wait and see, just a little while longer.