It seems highly likely that Amazon will finally announce its long-rumored smartphone next week at a special event. From what I’ve seen on Twitter and elsewhere, there’s a lot of skepticism about Amazon’s entry into this market, so I thought I’d review some of the reasons why I think it makes sense for Amazon to make a smartphone.
Amazon needs a storefront on mobile
Amazon is becoming an increasingly diversified company, with offerings across many parts of e-commerce, an increasingly strong digital content business, local grocery deliveries, a range of enterprise cloud services, and many others. On the desktop, Amazon.com is where these things come together – a unified storefront for all the things Amazon wants to sell you, carefully curated and personalized to combine what Amazon particularly wants to sell today with what it thinks you may be particularly interested in buying today. This allows Amazon to promote its Fire TV product, its Kindle Fire tablets, Prime shipping and Instant Video and various other products prominently, and thus cross-sell and up-sell to the hundreds of millions of people using Amazon.com on a regular basis.
But Amazon lacks such a storefront on mobile. Yes, it has a variety of standalone apps on mobile devices, including an Amazon.com commerce app, Instant Video, Kindle and Amazon MP3 apps. But they’re not interconnected the way the Amazon.com experience is, and there’s little push from one to another. In addition, though there was a time when a number of Android smartphones came with the Amazon MP3 app pre-installed, those days are now passed. Though Amazon still manages to do deals with Android OEMs and carriers from time to time to get some of its apps pre-installed, they’re often buried in a folder, and there’s little push for the user to use them. Meanwhile, the OEM, carrier or OS vendor’s own competing apps are often put front and center for the user.
Amazon therefore needs to create a mobile storefront equivalent to what it has on the desktop with Amazon.com, and to do that it needs to create an Amazon-centric experience on the most ubiquitous device, the smartphone.