In the space of a couple of weeks in March, Amazon has shown that it is a player to be reckoned with in the mobile phone sector. Not content to offer a competing App Store to Google’s Android Market it has announced the creation of what it calls a Digital Music Locker and a Cloud Player  which will allow registered users to upload their music to Amazon’s Cloud Drive and then listen to it on any computer browser or Android phone.  Music purchased through Amazon will automatically be added to the 5 gigabytes of storage  offered by the Cloud Drive service. For the user, the space simply operates like an extra hard drive to store music files and as such, does not take into account whether the music has been legally acquired or not! A fact that has displeased  a number of music companies.

With regard to the App Store, the number of applications available for Android phones has increased dramatically over the last year as developers begin to benefit from the same type of development framework that has until now, only been available from Apple. Will we see the same App explosion for Android devices as we saw for the iPhone? Probably not, for a number of different reasons.

For a start, developing an application for an Android phone means dealing with a ‘fragmented’ and diverse range of handset makers, specifications, OS versions, screen sizes and interactions that makes cross-platform applications tricky to put into place. Apple’s one size fits all greatly simplified things at the beginning. Secondly the payment system for Android developers is not as generous as Apple’s. On the other hand all the current market share predictions indicate that Android will be the dominant operating system for the next few years which will encourage developers greatly. A recent survey of some 250 developers reported in Fortune magazine confirms that while they may not like developing for the platform they are nevertheless busy doing just that!