Amazon Building Its Own Android App Market? 165
Thinkcloud writes "Speculation abounds that Amazon is planning their own storefront for selling Android apps, one in which they, not the developers, will set the price and decide which apps to feature (and which apps to exclude from the store all together). It's a shrewd move and smart strategy for Amazon, though its impact on app sellers is less certain."
Re:Fragmentation? No. (Score:3, Informative)
No, this is nothing like price fixing. Price fixing is when the majority of sellers of a given product to a certain market agree to set the same price, to artificially control supply and demand.
It could be price fixing if Amazon and Google where fixing the price between themselves and sell the apps for the same price, regardless of the app developers' wishes.
(this is horizontal price fixing. There is also vertical, when the producer colludes with the retailers. This also doesn't happen here, and besides it isn't illegal according to the US Supreme Court).
Re:yay. Literal market fragmentation. (Score:3, Informative)
Back in the days of DOS before Win95 took over the PC world, when the PC market was growing, while what you say was largely true as written, you have to remember that there was a lot less abstraction of hardware, and that the diversity (in the PC world) of hardware was at least as significant as the diversity of customized Android OS software and hardware combined (and, that there were quite a few versions of MS/PC-DOS, and toward the end of the period a few clones, floating around simultaneously as OS software), and yet the PC software market did quite well (and, once the Mac was around, better than the market for Mac software despite the latters more uniform target platform.)
Re:The Android Market sucks (Score:1, Informative)
Look up AppBrain.
It does this pretty well.
Re:Joy, another app store... (Score:3, Informative)