Amazon has announced that customers in the US, UK and Germany can now buy, spend and earn Amazon Coins on their Android phones and tablets. Previously available for use exclusively on Kindle Fire tablets, Amazon Coins can now be used to buy the latest apps directly from their Android device. Customers simply need to download the latest version of the Amazon Appstore and their existing Coins balances automatically appear.
“Since the launch of Amazon Coins, we’ve been amazed by the number of customers using Coins, as well as how many Coins they’re spending on apps and games,” said Mike George, Vice President, Amazon Appstore and Games. “Because customers can earn Coins when they buy apps in Amazon’s Appstore, and because they can buy Coins themselves at up to a 10% discount, customers love the extra value they get when shopping in our Appstore.”
Customers will find that earning extra Amazon Coins is easy and fun, whether it’s by downloading specific apps or by reaching achievements within certain games.
Amazon Appstore developers will continue to earn their standard 70% revenue share when customers make purchases using Amazon Coins. Expanding Amazon Coins across Android devices is the latest offering in an array of services that make Amazon the most complete end-to-end ecosystem for developers building, monetizing and marketing their apps and games. These capabilities include:
- The ability for app developers to use Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) technology platform for their infrastructure needs. Building blocks such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon DynamoDB allow developers to focus on what differentiates their app rather than the undifferentiated heavy lifting of infrastructure.
- In-App Purchasing on Kindle Fire, Android, Mac, PC and web-based games. This enables developers to offer their digital items in apps and games while allowing end users to simply use their Amazon accounts to make the purchase.
- Mobile Associates API for Kindle Fire and other Android devices. This enables developers to merchandise millions of physical and digital items from Amazon.com within their apps and games.
- Mobile Ads which helps developers monetize their apps by displaying high quality, relevant display ads from brand advertisers, including Amazon.
- HTML5/Web App Resources enables developers to distribute and sell web apps on Kindle Fire and select Android devices in nearly 200 countries across the globe.
- Appstore Developer Select improves app discovery through a broad range of marketing and economic benefits, which in turn, increases sales for developers. Benefits include enhanced merchandising in the Amazon Appstore, 500,000 mobile ad impressions, and discounts on Amazon Web Services.
- GameCircle which includes capabilities like Achievements, Leaderboards, Friends and Whispersync for syncing games across iOS and Android, including Kindle Fire, and leads to better engagement with games.
- A/B Testing enables developers to simultaneously test up to five different in-app experiences with a portion of their customers, evaluate performance, and roll out changes to everyone without having to republish their app.
- Analytics provides usage metrics on daily and monthly active devices, sessions, retention, and in-app purchase revenue. When using this service, developers can quickly assess how, for example, launch day is going or how a new feature might be affecting retention.
