TechCrunch reports on incentives ranging from featured placement in Amazon’s App Store to discounts on Amazon Web Services offered by Amazon to Android developers.
To qualify for program benefits, developers’ apps have to render in high definition (meaning using the entire screen without distortion or pixelation on Kindle Fire), and they must be available on both Kindle Fire and the Amazon Appstore, where they’re able to run on Amazon and non-Amazon Android devices alike.
Most importantly, the apps have to use Amazon’s APIs where relevant. That means games will have to implement the GameCircle API; those with in-app purchases need to use Amazon’s In-App Purchasing API; and those running ads will need to include the Amazon Mobile Ad SDK. And no, developers cannot pick and choose which API they’ll throw in there to meet the qualifications – it has to use the whole lot of them, depending on what makes sense given the application’s features and functions.
In other words, Android developers who wish to receive important marketing advantages must use Amazon specific APIs for a variety of features in their apps. This should not be surprising to anybody and is a sign of further fragmentation yet to come to the Android family of platforms.