Kindle Fire Accounts for 37% of U.S. Android Tablet Market
Barnes and Noble Nook took second place with a 10 percent share.
Mobile marketing and apps analytics firm Localytics has revealed that Amazon's Kindle Fire accounts for 37 percent of the U.S. Android tablet market.
The U.S. is the dominant market for Android tablet sales with a 59 percent share of global sales. Localytics says Amazon's share of the U.S. market has grown to the point where tablet app developers should make sure their apps are available through Amazon's App Store (the Google Play Store is not available on the Kindle Fire).
"In the meantime, any Android developer with a focus on tablets should be distributing their apps in the Amazon App Store," said Localytics, which analyzed data from over 500 million unique devices during its research.
"The degree to which Amazon has dominated their most serious geographical market should speak to the future potential, and since Google Play is unavailable on the Kindle Fire family, adding Amazon’s App Store as a distribution channel is important."
The Barnes and Noble Nook tablet took second place with a 10 percent market share in the U.S., while Samsung Galaxy devices settled for a 9 percent share. The Google Nexus 7, meanwhile, follows behind in fourth with an 8 percent market share.
With the Kindle Fire, at least you know the apps/games you see in the Amazon market place are compatible with your device and will run and work well. On top of that, there is more quality control in the Amazon Market and so even if your choices are fewer, the quality is higher overall.
Besides, there are so many shit apps out there, I really don't see the appeal to have to filter through more to find anything good.
With the Kindle Fire, at least you know the apps/games you see in the Amazon market place are compatible with your device and will run and work well. On top of that, there is more quality control in the Amazon Market and so even if your choices are fewer, the quality is higher overall.
Besides, there are so many *** apps out there, I really don't see the appeal to have to filter through more to find anything good.
What kind of logic is this..
Amazon's Tablet w/ Amazons market = compatibility as you claim.
So wouldn't this also be right, since as you claim the producer of the tablet also owns the market so native app support is a given.
Google's Tablet w/ Google's market = compatibility
Going off and saying "OH Kindle is better because Amazon apps are native on it!" and then completely ignoring the fact that Nexus 7 is just as good if not better because the full unaltered version of Google Play store also offers NATIVE Nexus 7 apps for their in house tablet.
So in the end, both products offer fully immersed compatibility with their in house products through their in house app stores.
The logic of some of these posters is baffling.
(Side note) I am especially amazed at the last part of the quote where the poster above me believes its better to have less choices/freedoms than to have more options/decisions than you can find uses for.
If you want a closed platform so badly, I suggest buying an apple product and leaving creativity to the people with common sense.
We saw the price drop on the 8.9 and grabbed it up. She really likes it. It's got enough content to keep her happy, while still being in a walled garden where she can't pick up any nasties.
"I am especially amazed at the last part of the quote where the poster above me believes its better to have less choices/freedoms than to have more options/decisions than you can find uses for."
More choices does not equal a better device or experience. Saying the Nexus 7 is better because it has access to the full Google Play store is a joke. It totally depends on the user. How many apps are you really going to use, honestly? Maybe a handful at most. And do you think it's worth filtering through hundreds of thousands of apps to find that handful that you use regularly? Fact is most of the best apps are already on Amazon. I own an Android phone and I can't think of a single app that isn't available on my Kindle that is on my phone that I want. It's not that having more choices is bad, it's that most people don't have time to filter through them.
"Google's Tablet w/ Google's market = compatibility"
I can tell you from experience with my android phone this is definitely not true. This is where the Nexus has gotten the most slack from reviews as well, dinging it for it's lack of native apps. Just because you got a Nexus 7 Google tablet, there are no guarantees that the apps will run or work well. And even though it is a powerful tablet, it only matters if developers take full advantage of the hardware.
Amazon is not as "closed" as you are making it out to be either. In the settings you can enable installation of 3rd party apps. But the simple UI is meant to be user friendly and not riddled with settings most people won't use. If you want to tweak the hell out of your tablet, go for it, I prefer to use mine and spend less time tinkering with it. That's what my home PC is for.
That's why I have a kindle fire HD and not a Cr apple.
Out of curiosity, what are the Nexus 7-native apps? I am familiar with Tegra-3/Tegra-2 specific games, but aside from that, I haven't come across nexus-specific apps.
In all fairness, have you owned and used a Kindle Fire HD for a real period of time? I'm not saying it's the best tablet for everyone, but having owned and used an Asus transformer extensively, I have far fewer frustrations that center around the OS and Apps with the Fire HD--it's a far more integrated than google-android tablets, and you also get access to Amazon's services. Now, if you haven't invested in that ecosystem (namely Amazon Videos, which you can't get on standard android tablets), then there's no real reason to choose one over a standard android tablet. Finally, what does openness get someone that just wants a decent experience? What if someone just want to be able to read their amazon books, watch my amazon movies, and have an integrated amazon buying experience? Why are you so against that? Isn't that a pretty convenient thing for someone to have, rather than some disjointed but open tablet that lacks access to those services? What works for one person doesn't always work for the other, and if you don't think the Amazon tablet ecosystem works for you, that's fine. But you're not everyone.
I also can't stand when people talk about the ad-sponsored deals that show up on kindle fire's as some brainwashing message that forces people to buy things. Don't want something? Don't buy it. But on more than one occasion, I get pushed a deal that I was already going to buy, and end up getting a discount. I'm not buying anything I wasn't going to otherwise. Not to mention that through the kindle owner's lending library, I get shown books that are free to "borrow" indefinitely on my kindle that I otherwise would have to buy on any other device. That's a pretty nice feature.
Google does nothing to monitor or do any sort of QA on 3rd party apps and how they run on devices--that's up to the developers of the app. Now, to clear the air, Amazon doesn't QA test 100% of the apps in their app store either, and many of the apps are literal copies of the one from the google play store. The only 3rd party apps Amazon does any sort of testing on are apps that were built by developers to specifically run on their Fire tablets--while that's only a small fraction of the apps in the amazon app store, I have yet to have issue running any of said apps (ranging from utilities to pretty nice looking games) on my Fire HD, whereas if I run analogous apps on my Transformer, I usually encounter problems.
That's not to say that there's one platform that's appropriate for everyone. If kindle fire's don't work for you, there's nothing wrong with that. But having dealt with the "open" android experience through my transformer, I am always getting crashes with apps and the OS on the stock vendor-released firmware versions, which is a frustrating thing to deal with all the time.