“Try and Buy” Approach on the Amazon Appstore

First, the Amazon Appstore was confronting the Apple App Store with its similar name, and now it’s introducing a brand new promotion method.

Launched last week, the Internet shop offers a variety of Android applications to visitors who now can try them for 30 minutes before they make their decision regarding the purchase.

The “Test Drive” function is free and is embodied by a virtual Android smartphone. The emulator is controlled with a mouse that simulates touch-screen manipulations accompanied with sound effects. All the real-time testing is ensured by the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) web service and allows visitors actually try all the application functions.

So far, the application store only has 20 Android applications available for test drive and download, but the appealing test function will certainly be extended to all submitted apps sooner or later. At the same time, it is nice to notice that the Amazon Appstore offers more or less efficient applications as oppose to unpretentious apps by the numerous iPhone developers out there.