Apple is known for keeping a bustling legal department. Steve Jobs reportedly swore to “destroy Android“, the results of which Samsung has felt very well.
But Apple has more enemies to fight. It holds a complicated relationship with Amazon, who now produces the second most selling tablet after the iPad, claiming it already owns 22% of the US tablet market. That’s a lot of iPads that Apple isn’t selling, and so it readies its own iPad Mini in response.
A less familiar front in this battle is Apple’s “False Advertising” suit against Amazon with regard to the latter’s use of “App Store” for its Android-based application market. Amazon’s response ridiculed this claim, but this does raise the question – what exactly is Amazon’s app store all about?
Amazon’s Kindle store is one strange beast. Kindle apps are in fact re-purposed Android apps, with some added functionality. However, Amazon took care to clearly differentiate the Kindle’s UX and app store from the general Android market. So what is the justification for developing an extra Kindle app?
Every application development platform has its unique core capabilities, which developers can leverage for their own application. Developers get to apply their creative ideas on these assets, while the platform owner enjoys increased engagement for their users, with apps taking these capabilities to places the platform did not even imagine. Facebook’s application platform revolved around the social graph, a unique and very valuable data asset, and Apple provided access to the iPhone’s unique (at the time) features such as its accelerometers and gyroscope, GPS and camera.
Visiting the Amazon Kindle SDK site shows where Amazon feels it has the advantage: 1-click purchasing. This patented Amazon feature (a patent which Apple has actually licensed) can appeal to application developers who feel their application has premium features worth paying for, if only the payment was frictionless. Initial results seemed to validate that, and show excellent revenue per user on Amazon’s platform.
And so, Amazon’s platform says a lot about where Amazon feels its strength lies with the Kindle. Unlike Apple, Amazon builds its success in the tablets market on selling content, much less than selling devices. Hence, expect Kindle to continue beating the iPad on price even when iPad mini launches.
The Alter Egozi 