On December 6, Amazon announced, “App downloads in the Appstore have grown more than 500 percent over the previous year.” Presumably, most of those downloads have come from Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets, which run Android but do not connect with Google Play or other app stores.
As part of the same announcement, Amazon also unveiled a new feature for mobile developers: A/B testing. “With A/B Testing, developers can test simultaneous treatments of their apps, receive data about what’s worked best, and quickly adjust their apps to take advantage of this customer learning,” said the company. “A/B Testing is the latest developer service that Amazon has launched (along with Achievements, Leaderboards, Whispersync across devices, In-App Purchasing, and 1-Click Purchasing) that make it simpler than ever for app developers to concentrate on the differentiating parts of their apps rather than the undifferentiated infrastructure and engagement components.”