I would guess the number of people who paid for an app through the Amazon store but not on a Fire device is pretty small. And do you ever really own an app? I have so few that I paid a one time payment for.

They wanted android developers that used google play services to basically be able to submit the same app to the amazon/fire store (without major revisions), so they reverse engineered the framework used by Google for api/hooks between the apps/apks and the "play-services"/OS levels.

Sort of spoofed the environment to prioritize compatibility in order to make it as easy as possible to grow the Amazon app store.

People don't realize that despite Android being nominally 'Open Source', the closed source Google layer on most phones makes it very difficult to exclude Google entirely from the picture and have a user friendly phone environment (both end-user and app-developer/playstore-user).

Basically only Amazon and China had resources to counter it directly with Android, or you could drop that layer and go the less user friendly route of st like AOSP 'pure' phones.

After all, earn trust and customer obsession are two of their leadership principles

I quit recently. I couldn't trust anyone to act in good faith. My days were getting worse. Stress at all time high. It comes down from the top aka Jassy and Bezos.

Edited per requests

Last year I read the book Julia by Sandra Newman, which shows the story of 1984 from Winston's lover's perspective. Spoiler, at the very end of the book, Julia escapes Airstrip One, and we find out that Big Brother has just been captured by the good guys, and he is now a decrepit old man with no understanding of the world.

This implies that all the suffering, hardship, and pain experienced in the dystopian classic happens for no reason at all. Airstrip One is just a machine that gnashes and grinds each individual person within it and outputs... nothing.

This is the closest any book has gotten to describing my Amazon experience. I read headlines like this and wonder how long the machine continue to run for.

I assume there is already something in the EULA covering their asses. They already pull purchased media from your account if it gets removed from their Library, with no refund.

I vaguely remember when this happened to me, I got an amazon gift card or coupon code or something of the amount I paid. I'm not saying they will do the same in this instance, but maybe?

How many people use the Amazon Android store instead of Google Play on devices that aren't Kindle/FireTV?

It also lacks a dozen side services I don’t use. If you’re all in on Amazon Music, that’d be a con.

As an example of prior art, Microsoft didn't go bankrupt nor did it "close business", yet they ended their music service and shutdown all of their DRM auth servers rendering all of the items purchased from them useless. This is the same thing.

Wiping out customers' purchases when you've got $100 billion in the bank, though? Kinda a dick move.

What you call a dick move might actually have made sense financially for a business. If MS Music was losing money with no hopes of ever turning a profit, why should they continue to operate a charity music service subsidized by all of the other MS businesses that are making money?

Same thing for Amazon. If it is something that shows no signs of paying for itself, why continue to operate it? You have to stop the bleeding at some point. What was the attraction to a dev to use Amazon over Google? Lower percentage of the take? Maybe that explains why it was a money loser?

At the end of the day, it was a bet on a losing horse.

Of course it makes financial sense for the business. Taking the customer's money and not delivering the promised product is really profitable, if you can get away with it.

Still a dick move though.

Microsoft could make a deal with, say, Apple. They check each Microsoft Music (Xbox Music? Zune Music?) account for total spend, and give people an iTunes gift card for nearest total amount. Negotiate a bulk pricing deal with Apple.

Microsoft gets to look good, Apple gets to look good. But it'd cost 0.001% of total Microsoft profit and the shareholders can't have that.

Compare that to some other businesses that will happily recommend you to a competitor if it is a better fit, or if they shut down go out of their way to write a tool or help you with off- and onboarding to an alternative.

When Google shut down Stadia they refunded all purchases - both games and hardware.

You missed a "/s" at the end, I guess?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

[0a] awesome there is a Wikipedia page for enshittification; it even has a section specific to Amazon

1: https://hackaday.com/2021/08/02/home-depot-is-selling-power-...

apparently they haven't seen proof that this is a thing inside the tools (per that article at least) but if i was tasked with this i'd use programmable fuses on the mCU. Battery pack in, hit the trigger twice or something, put it on the activation thing, the mCU nukes the "deactivated" fuses, and it will permanently be enabled.

what do you want to bet it isn't that? btw it could be, i just thought of the first thing that would guarantee the purchaser always had their tool that they had purchased. anything that requires some mechanical linkage to move (a relay was mentioned) will break the first time you drop the tool on its nuts.

Also if your phone breaks on a job you get to go home because "none of my tools work anymore, sorry"

edit: it took me a minute but the theft numbers are like 0.8% and i bet most places would love to have shrink that low.

as a comparison 17% of minimum wage earners have experienced losses averaging a quarter of their gross paychecks. All theft except wage theft in the US (larceny, grand, robbery, fraud) is ~35% of just the recovered wages (in 2012 i am looking at).

0.8% shrink, lol

[0] i got my data from https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-fo... for this post but i knew what to look for because there was a nice graphic showing the ratios of all theft and wage theft is easily 3x as large as the rest i saw a year or two ago.

>principles

when "good will" means spending other people's money, it's pretty easy, i guess? something infrastructure development something

Don't make excuses for Amazon, please.

It's nothing special, just a location tracker that logs to a file every so often based on time and/or distance moved (could also ping a URL with encoded location info instead). Basically the underlying data for location history without relying on Google. Its notable feature years ago was that it would do location 'steals' - instead of just triggering a then-expensive location check, it would grab the most current available location info as triggered by some other application and only force an update if that information was too old.

What are some well-known apps sold as one-time purchases now?

What I've heard is that one-time purchases lead to a lack of income after three years, when people expect upgrades. That's not a problem for app developers who don't plan to do any upgrades, of course.

Notably I'll throw in a few things like PocketCasts, Nova Launcher, Gentle Alarm by Mobitobi, a variety of camera and gallery apps. Some of those shifted to subscriptions (PocketCasts after being sold twice), others just got shuttered.

i'm not in the habit of buying apps anymore. I did drop a lot of money on the wolfram alpha iOS app when it first launched (it was over $50 at the time iirc, but to hedge i'll say "adjusted for inflation")

This is why I ignore people who hit their "walled garden" macro every time an Apple thread appears on HN. I just don't trust alt stores.

Sure, choice is a great thing. But if you want to dump lots of money into some random "app store" run by who-knows-who in who-knows-where for who-knows-how-long? Go for it. Not me.

It's bad enough that I've had at least a dozen apps disappear from my iDevices over the years because the companies running them went out of business, pivoted, exited, or otherwise disappeared or stopped supporting their product. The last thing I want is for an entire app store's worth of apps to suddenly go away.

You can't even trust the big companies, let alone the little ones. Remember when Microsoft closed its e-book store?

With Apple I need to beg for my dev account to be approved, pay 100$ a year, and submit it via test flight.

If more than X numbers of people use it , ohh no I have to publish it via the app store. If it pleases King Cook, may I publish a game for my friends to play.

Google is starting to restrict Android too, custom system roms aren't as popular anymore, but theirs still a sense it's my phone.

With Apple, it's still Apple's phone, you've just purchased a revokable license to use it in accordance with the terms you agreed to.

This happens just the same on iOS when Apple drops support for a device. First-party stores are not a defense against this. It's theoretically easier to plan for, but you're still at the mercy of Apple's support window.

Once upon a time you could download an app and it would work indefinitely, but that's not the way any modern app-store based systems really work. What Amazon is doing here is probably less impactful than when Apple kills certain APIs and breaks a bunch of apps with an update. (I'm certain Amazon and Apple both do estimated math about the number of devices/apps/users they're breaking, and I'm also certain just based on volume that Amazon is breaking fewer people/apps with this change than Apple does routinely.)

I would love to be able to install weird, open source apps on my iPhone, the same way I could on my Android phones.

I myself forgot Microsoft once (cough) sold e-books.

However, Amazon did at one point in time sell ebooks in multiple formats pre-Kindle, one of which was Microsoft Reader. (I assume the others were PDF and Mobipocket.) So they have form for closing up shop and killing access to purchases like this.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_Music

No, the logic is that several large companies (Amazon, Apple, Microsoft) have done bad things on their app store, so no stores can be trusted. But for me, I trust a big name store more than I trust an small unknown store.

Yes. That's why I listed it right next to Apple and Microsoft in my response.

https://www.rif.org

Yeah I could get mauled by a bear if I get my fruits from the wild. But that's probably not a risk with the vendor from a neighboring town.

And if there's a fruit I can only get from the wild, who are you to tell me I can't have it? Maybe I get mauled by a bear. Maybe I get robbed in the neighboring town. But what else am I to do when what I want isn't available at the local marketplace?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reckless_(Bryan_Adams_album)

It seems like it would be trivial for a user to login to the app acquired from a different store to be able to display a "welcome back" or even something along the lines of a "restore purchases" type of thing.

This can't be reinventing the wheel kind of a thing.

The only way a developer would know a person is an existing user is if they have a user sign up process inside the app itself.

It is doable, the main issues is: 1. Getting users to redownload the app from the Play store 2. Maintaining this registration transfer mechanism

Shattered Pixel Dungeon was a good example of me paying on one platform, and then applying the upgrade to the free app after downloading on another.

This isn't any different from a user switching to a new device and having to download apps again. Not everyone restores from backup and prefers clean installs. Downloading an app again should not be the point of friction

I suppose I could analyze that data, although I can't think of an actual good reason to do so. I have no idea whether those records are real or fabricated. So no real way to verify that google is paying me the correct amount. Since you asked.

It was an idle curiosity. If i ever make an app, it'll have a trivial authenticated hosted back end, just to keep google honest!

Renting, however, does not work that way. Any DRM-protected download is a rental. Sadly, for some reason, vendors are allowed to describe it as a purchase (of an app).

I don’t know why you are giving up.

There's no guarantee you'll be able to easily use an ebook in today's formats 50 years from now.

Same for applications.

You're really that confident in 50 years you'll be able to easily run x86 applications written for Windows or Mac?

You don't need binary compatibility. You can load a gif on any computer today, and it's old. I can view aiff image files from my Amiga still.

We're already 50 years in on many formats.

Where it becomes uncertain, it DRM laden, closed source applications with bespoke file formats.

How many image formats CAN'T you read today that you could read 50 years ago?

2) Images are much much much more ubiquitous than book formats

I would bet that the vast majority if not all image formats that can't be read anymore are due to their spec never being published.

GIF, JPEG, MP3... these are all patented technologies whose patents have expired into the public domain. That they're still used and useful today is a very strong indication that they'll be available in another 50 years. I think that having public patents for image and audio formats helps to demonstrate that it's more than just survivorship bias.

I don’t know. How many?

That supports 200 image file formats as inputs, and you can then export it to PNG or GIF or BMP.

Your question, on its face, seems ok, but really, there's probably millions of image file formats lost to the sands of time. Shareware image creation programs, tiny fly-by-nite company's software that only ever had one major release (probably some cad formats in there. Those were where i used to always have problems 22 years ago when i did this for work.)

however, at least 200 of them are preserved through that "company's" dedication to this topic.

I have no idea what “easily” means here, but I’m not unique. While these open-format ebooks remain of interest to even a small community, they will remain readable and convertable.

What makes you doubt that?

> You're really that confident in 50 years you'll be able to easily run x86 applications written for Windows or Mac?

Again, I have no idea what “easily” means here. However, my use of “proper” also wasn’t clear (I edited it down from “free software”).

“Proper” certainly implies that their runnability does not depend on the wall clock, or availability of an internet service. Yes, I am confident that I can run such programs in the future, on appropriate hardware.

(Note how the thread is about digital, not physical, things.)

Computer games have a similar problem. There is an EU petition specifically for computer games to stop such practice:

https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home

We need a petition like this for all software.

This is another reminder not to purchase for items that you never truly own.