Amazon’s AppStore hits 31,000 apps in one year, offers a week of app deals to celebrate

Amazon’s Android AppStore has turned one year old and to celebrate the company has announced it will be offering a week of deals on what it says are its customer’s favourite apps and games including Fruit Ninja, Monopoly, AccuWeather and starting today Plants vs. Zombies — which has a 67% discount.

The discounts will be incremental; so today you will see one app deal, tomorrow you will see two and on day three, three more app deals will be made available. That will continue until the week is up.

Amazon’s AppStore launched on March 22, offering access to over 3,800 applications at the time. It partnered with mobile game developer Rovio to launch its new Angry Birds Rio game exclusively.

“Customers have used the Amazon Appstore to test drive and buy millions of apps and games for their Kindle Fire and other Android devices in the first year alone,” said Aaron Rubenson, director of Amazon Appstore for Android. “To thank customers for shopping with us, we worked closely with our developers to offer special discounts on some of the most popular apps all week long.”

Amazon’s marketplace differs to the Android Market (or Google Play), as the company set the prices the apps would sell for. On Amazon’s store, developers suggest a price, but Amazon can amend it.

This means it can be less than the sale price on the Android Market, but Amazon pays developers 70 percent of the sale price or 20 percent of the price the developer suggests the app sells for, whichever is greater.

Amazon also shared some interesting AppStore statistics, including:

• Amazon Appstore has grown its selection nearly eight-fold since launch, from 4,000 apps to over 31,000.
• In its first year, the most downloaded paid app in the Amazon Appstore was Cut the Rope, followed by Angry Birds (Ad-Free) and Where’s My Water?; the most downloaded free app was Angry Birds Free, followed by Netflix and Solitaire by MobilityWare.
• Amazon Appstore offers a paid app for free every day. If a customer had downloaded every Free App of the Day since launch, they would have saved nearly $1,000.
• The paid app with the most 5-star reviews in the first year of the Amazon Appstore was Where’s My Water?, with over 3,000; the free app with the most 5-star reviews was Blood & Glory, with over 4,000.
• In the Amazon Appstore’s first year, customers spent more than 7,700,000 minutes test driving apps; Bubble Buster was the most test-driven app, followed by Amazon MP3 for Android with Cloud Player and Memory Trainer.
• Over the past year, the most popular app category for customers is games, followed by entertainment and productivity. Some of the most popular apps include Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, Netflix, Hulu, Pandora, QuickOffice Pro, CalenGoo and Exchange by TouchDown.

In its first year of availability, the Amazon AppStore’s most popular paid app is Cut the Rope, followed by Angry Birds, Where’s My Water?, Angry Birds Rio (Ad-Free) and Angry Birds Seasons (Ad-Free). As you can see, Rovio’s Angry Birds dominates the leaderboard.

When it comes to free apps, Angry Birds leads the way, with Netflix, Solitare, Fruit Ninja Free and Angry Birds Seasons Free making up Amazon’s top five.