A few months ago Amazon surprised the world by launching its Cloud Drive and Cloud Player, a music locker service that allowed users to upload and store their entire music collection (well, up to 5GB of it) to stream and download as they wished.
The reason this proved surprising was that all eyes had been on Google and Apple, who had widely been expected to launch similar services to bolster their competing mobile platforms, Android and iOS respectively.
Nevertheless, Amazon launched their Cloud Player and were promptly sued by various music industry bodies, who claim a specific license is required to stream their content – a license which Amazon had not acquired.
So now the dust has settled and Google and Apple have both played their cards. However, Google Music is still in a US-only beta and Apple’s iCloud won’t launch formally until the autumn, making Amazon the only game in town. Today the retail giant has announced a pretty big promotion for its Cloud Player, perhaps indicating that uptake isn’t quite what they had expected.
The promotion means that anyone who signs up to a paying Cloud Drive subscription (which start at $20 per year for 20GB) will get free unlimited storage. Additionally, any users with limited storage will now find that music they download from Amazon does not count towards their storage total (Apple offer this same deal for iCloud users who purchase music through iTunes). The retail giant also announced their Cloud Player is now optimised for use on the iPad.
It’s seems Cloud Player and Cloud Drive aren’t the only Amazon mobile services not pulling their weight – the Amazon Appstore, which offers a curated Android Market with daily freebies, has recently come under fire by the developer of popular Android physics game Apparatus for being a raw deal for developers, as well as a beaurocratic nightmare.
Although neither Google nor Amazon release usage figures for their respective outlets, popular iPhone game Cut The Rope, which was recently released on Android, has seen 2,215 reviews on the Android Market, yet on 62 on the Amazon Appstore. Similarly, puzzle game Fruit Ninja has garnered around 250 reviews on Amazon’s service, yet has almost 22,000 on Google’s.
It’s not all bad news for Amazon though – this week a judge threw out Apple’s request for an injunction to prevent Amazon using the Appstore name, which it claims falls under its copyright for “App Store”.
