Amazon has produced 11 generations of Fire devices, but they all serve a very specific purpose: a portal to purchasing things from Amazon. That means their innovation has come in the form of having the absolute lowest cost devices for their level of build and hardware quality. They've innovated in that direction, investing quite heavily. You seem to want them to innovate in terms of features: That's fine as an opinion, but that is not the only direction for innovation, and Fires already have the most important feature Amazon wants for consumers: a smooth integration to buying stuff.
Eink readers, as I said, are a completely different product class, not at all comparable to iOS. And if you chart the progress they've made since their original eink devices there have been significant improvements.
The kindle app on Android has a 4.7 star rating. On iOS it's 4.8. A few negative reviews don't mean anything when their ratings are that high. Whatever issues people have, they are outliers.
I'm no Amazon fanboy-- I don't like them very much as a company. But they have absolutely innovated, you just disagree with the directions they have chosen to go with that innovation.
- Amazon has not seriously invested in Kindle or its ecosystem. Amazon does not because it does not face competition.
- Amazon does not allow apps or a HW sdk for eBook readers, which might make the products much more useful. (such as offering a wireless page turning device)
- Apple should charge for eBook purchases through the kindle app, because iOS does provide value that Amazon realizes.
- Amazon makes major financial investment in their own Android ecosystem. Amazon charges 70% itself for "in-app products" to cover all of their innovation in that area.
- While my original comment's parent focused on the security of the App Store as a value, it is only a contribution to the innovation Apple also has made into that ecosystem.
I disagree that the negative reviews can be equated. It would take analysis, but it appears to me that device incompatibility which is a platform problem is the main source of negative reviews on Android.
Whereas on the iOS side, the negative reviews are related to product features that affect both Android (Google and Amazon marketplaces and iOS.
If this is true, then it suggests that iOS users of the Kindle app are getting even more value out of the iOS platform than Android users. This would be greater underlying reason Apple should be compensated for the sale of eBooks from Amazon.
Sort of separately, but worth mentioning: our local library uses Overdrive to distribute and handle eBook loans and their licensing. Overdrive has a native app and it integrates with Amazon. The Overdrive app is free, and so is the use of Amazon to perform this loaning process.
So eBooks can be readily had in the App store for free.
It's not like Amazon is crushing competitors trying to build inexpensive reasonable quality tablets. What would a competitor even look like? The average buyer is looking for a tablet that let's them consume content purchased through Amazon, a bit of web browsing, and buying things off the Amazon store. Amazon doesn't care about investing in the kindle ecosystem because because if another competitor came along that met those same consumer needs, they wouldn't care. They aren't selling tablets as a profit center. They're selling them as an interface to their ecosystem, which is why consumers want them. If someone else came along and did the same thing they'd be thrilled that tablets that accomplish their goals might get more market penetration.
Anything that isn't aligned with making it a streamlined portal to buying more stuff is needless fluff, especially anything that allows interoperability with content not purchased through Amazon.
I think kindle has ended up in this place but it isn’t where it was hoped to go.
I remember when the Amazon App Store was first announced and there was no talk of the devices being these value oriented Amazon content consuming portals.
There were a lot of competitors back then.
This was still around the time Palm had just given up, BlackBerry was briefly hopeful with the Playbook but most importantly the Barnes and Noble Nook was competing hard for these users.
In my anecdotal experience, Amazon Kindle fire purchasers were not in love with Amazon back then.
They just didn’t want to spend the money Apple was asking for iPads (which lacked as many purchase points and previous gens)
In one clear example, the person was downloading apps to do soduku, trying to listen to podcasts. whatever but did not subscribe to Prime and did not do delivery of items.
Do you understand the current posture of Amazon toward app dev on Fire to be negative / not encouraging?
I can see why these would be focused now entirely on portal to Amazon, but then I wonder why have an App Store for the product at all.
I suppose they have an app store because that's a key desire for consumers. Amazon knows customers want to play angry birds or whatever, so they have an app store with the minimum selection necessary to make sure customers don't pass on purchasing one.
As for the development ecosystem, I really don't know. Even as a user, I side-load the normal Android app store.
Eink readers, as I said, are a completely different product class, not at all comparable to iOS. And if you chart the progress they've made since their original eink devices there have been significant improvements.
The kindle app on Android has a 4.7 star rating. On iOS it's 4.8. A few negative reviews don't mean anything when their ratings are that high. Whatever issues people have, they are outliers.
I'm no Amazon fanboy-- I don't like them very much as a company. But they have absolutely innovated, you just disagree with the directions they have chosen to go with that innovation.