Apple Could Learn One Thing From Amazon Appstore

The recently unwrapped Android-based Amazon.com Appstore includes one feature quite extraordinary: Test Drive, which allows customers to play an app before actually buying it. However, Test Drive is much more than an app playground: it could change how iOS customers purchase their apps in the future; or at least it should. Billions of apps have been downloaded from the App Store, but how many of those are still being used? Probably not as many as you’d think. Don’t believe it? Just compare the list of apps you’ve purchased over the years with those still on your iPhone/iPod touch or iPad, and you’ll get the idea. Beyond reading an app’s description and maybe a few reviews, you really don’t know if you’ll like an app unless you purchase it. And the hard truth is many times that $4.99 app just isn’t worth it. Amazon.com, with its Test Drive feature, lets users test an app using an Android virtual machine. This isn’t a screenshot, but rather a working copy of Android accessible through your web browser. It includes working mouse controls and you can even delete the app just as you would on an actual device.

But there’s more: The virtual Android machine lets you browse through the device’s photo gallery, see what it’s like to listen to a few songs, or even surf the web. Yep, Amazon.com isn’t just trying to sell you an app, but rather an Android device itself. According to Amazon.com:

Clicking the "Test drive now" button launches a copy of this app on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a web service that provides on-demand compute capacity in the cloud for developers. When you click on the simulated phone using your mouse, we send those inputs over the Internet to the app running on Amazon EC2 - just like your mobile device would send a finger tap to the app. Our servers then send the video and audio output from the app back to your computer. All this happens in real time, allowing you to explore the features of the app as if it were running on your mobile device.

So what does Test Drive mean for iOS users? At the minimum, it should convince Apple to implement a similar feature into its App Store. Long term, however, it would be a nice stepping-stone to being able to test an app virtually using your iPhone or iPad data, and not just with a blank slate that Amazon.com provides here. What do you think? Leave your comments below.

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