With Amazon soaring in popularity and people becoming more comfortable with the choices of Android app marketplaces available today, glaring inconsistencies and short comings arise. Amazon is a great place to get nearly everything under the sun, but because of its nature and the fact that its a retail site for all things thingy, they keep tight records of your transactions.Whenever you buy something from the site they keep a record of it, for various reason all of which are business related. When it comes to Android software, this is not entirely a good thing. People complain frequently about the need to have a credit card stored in your Amazon account to get free apps of the day, but this is true with every app, even lite or demo releases. One long list is created including every single app you've activated to your account or device. Every demo, lite version and full or pro version is included. Lets say you download the lite version of Wordfeud to give it a try. Wow, this app is incredible and you say, "hey, its cheaper on the Amazon Appstore than on the Android Market. I'll buy that!" So you do. But now it appears in your list twice, one is the lite and the other is the ad-free version. This sucks!
What can we do about this??? Hmm, they most likely won't allow people to delete the apps in this list because they issue a receipt for everything including the free stuff. To Amazon, every app is purchased and therefor must be catalogued. But maybe, just maybe, they could allow you to hide apps of your choosing from your list. Like layers of an onion, you could not see layers of apps beneath the first unless you so choose to. At the very least, this would be extremely helpful on Android devices. My list of apps has surpassed 50 and approaches 60, of which are not installed at this time. More than 20 are currently installed. I would like to hide some 30 or more if I had the choice.
What are your thoughts on the matter? When compared to the Android Market, purchased apps paid for with a credit card where an actual exchange of currency is made are the only apps that remain on your list after uninstalling. Demos are no longer kept in a list and therefor become a burden no more. This is obviously something Google felt the need to consider when designing the Android Market and where Amazon deemed unimportant.
You can help by taking the thoughts expressed here and forming your own opinion of the matter. If enough people were to send Amazon a feature request we may sway them to consider and eventually implement a fix to this potentially crippling oversight. Find "Contact Us" on Amazon's Appstore for Android and do us all a favor.
