Amazon today said its Appstore is now available to customers in nearly 200 countries.
However, the actual number of countries represented by “nearly 200”, Amazon PR didn’t know, as they hadn’t counted.
When a list was forwarded to What Mobile, we counted 192, although one of the countries listed was Bouvet Island, which the Internet tells us is an uninhabited volcanic island.
What Mobile is awaiting Amazon’s reply as to the inclusion of this ‘country’ on the list and whether the automated weather station on the island will be accessing the app store much.
Other countries included New Zealand, Australia, Tonga, Austria, Argentina and Mexico.
Fruit Ninja celebration
Amazon said customers could now purchase apps and games from the store on Android devices (including Kindle Fire), Macs and PCs. Amazon is offering Fruit Ninja, Cut the Rope: Experiments and Tetris as Free Apps of the Day in celebration, available May 23 (for Fruit Ninja) and May 24, Amazon said.
Amazon is pushing its personalized recommendations and Free App of the Day (where a different paid app is offered free every day) as reasons to use its store as opposed to rivals, with apps and games purchased from Amazon can be used across compatible Android devices.
An Amazon spokesperson said last month the company had opened its Developer Portal for developers to submit apps and games for distribution through the Amazon Appstore – perhaps looking to increase its comparatively limited stock of apps (Venturebeat reported in April that the Amazon Appstore has 75,000 compared with the Play store’s 600,000).
Available in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, China and Japan, the Appstore would be available in Brazil in the coming months, Amazon said.
The Kindle Fire will also be made available in more than 170 new countries from June 13.
