Yes - they had an excellent brand for quantity of product and quality of service. Their whole competition with Google and lack of support of its products has been undermining that.

It seems a particularly bad move given the quick delivery space has many competitors now and Wal-mart, Target, Jet.com... have began competing with online orders. Reputation will be extremely important.

The lack of chromecast support was why I never jumped on Prime video.

I get that you want more people to use your fire stick, but as a source of entertainment competing with Netflix and HBO, you want to be more accessible, not less.

Just out of curiosity, was streaming video your primary use case for Prime? I'm a huge fan of Amazon Prime (for purchasing goods with free two-day shipping), but I've never used the Prime streaming services at all.

No, I've primarily used Amazon for purchasing physical items when I need them yesterday. That said, I'm no stranger to Amazon's streaming product -- prior to the release of the Chromecast, Amazon was my primary source for purchased video content via PS3 (Currently I have 38 movies and ~8 seasons of television episodes in the account). This also meant I'd frequently use Amazon Prime video to avoid having to switch over to the Netflix app.

I'm far less concerned with the availability of the streaming product itself, and more upset about the corporate mindset this behavior demonstrates.

Same here, shipping is probably my biggest benefit, prime's video offerings are about the same as Netflix's

This is why I use Prime Video over Netflix. Video selection is equivalent, but Prime is cheaper and comes with the added shipping, music, and eBook benefits.

I'd never thought of it from that angle -- though I'd have a hard time letting go of my Netflix exclusives (house of cards, etc)

I believe they required sideloading because of Google Play's restrictions on selling items / subscriptions without giving Google a cut.

Google does not restrict the ability to sell items through your app; that's Apple. You can implement a store in your app with purchases if you want, without using Google's payment system. And many such apps exist in the Play store.

What you can't do in an app in the Play store is implement your own app store and load arbitrary apps. And Amazon forces you to install the full Amazon app including its app store, rather than offering a standalone version of Amazon Video.

Amazon likely does this because people care enough about Amazon Video to jump through hoops to get it, and once people have jumped through those hoops, Amazon can then try to get them to use the Amazon app store instead of Play.

And their forcing you to install an app store shim that asks for ALL/ALL application rights is why they got booted to my "snoopy vendors only" Android profile: the one with zero human contact information. For those of us willing to put the time into it I'd love a cleaner way to containerize apps and firewall off personal information.

An Android for Work profile runs on Android's new containerization feature (derived from Knox). You'll either need a separate Apps account or use a custom Work Policy Controller[1] as a lightweight app container.

I'd not be surprised if someone has built something marketable on this stack already.

[1] https://developer.android.com/training/enterprise/work-polic...

Slick! I will have to try imposing a profile on something like Uber to see what happens. :-)

That's interesting, I didn't know you could do that with Android. That is a hell of an awesome feature, coming from an iOS user. IMO, we'll almost be forced to maintain multiple identities in the future, and it's good to hear that Google is getting a jump on that trend.

It makes sense, of course, considering that this approach will let Google -- but no one else -- know who all those identities point back to.

It's not in every Android distribution: for instance Samsung doesn't include it on their phones, but profiles are one of the benefits of running stock Android on a Nexus phone.

> "snoopy vendors only" Android profile

That's a brilliant idea, especially now that the multi-user support works on phones in addition to tablets.

If you're willing to root your phone there's an xposed privacy framework that inserts itself between the OS and snoopy apps to allow finer access control.

http://repo.xposed.info/module/biz.bokhorst.xprivacy

This allows you discretion for apps you still wish to install but demand too many privileges.

Unlike in the iTunes App Store, that restriction is only on items and subscriptions that can only be consumed inside the app. That's why Amazon can continue to sell music and Netflix can continue to sell subscriptions in their apps. There is nothing stopping Amazon from offering Prime Instant Video through the Play Store with no modifications.