Amazon’s made it a bit of tougher to purchase Kindle books on Android

It felt like a sneaky hack as a result of, for years, you possibly can purchase a Kindle e book on the Amazon app on an Android system if you couldn’t do the very same factor on an iOS one. But that distinctive relationship has ended, as first noted by Ars Technica. When making an attempt to buy ebooks on the Amazon app on Android, you’re now directed to a brand new display screen explaining why the buying possibility is gone. If you occur to replace the app, you’ll see an identical word as to what you see on an iOS system that claims buying digital merchandise on the app is unavailable.

Amazon pulled digital e book shopping for help from iOS gadgets again in 2011. The purpose was to keep away from the “tax” Apple’s App Store inflicts on digital items. Comixology, the comedian e book app, misplaced the flexibility in 2014 not lengthy after Amazon acquired it. It was, and continues to be, a deeply annoying byproduct of the Apple App Store ecosystem. If you see a e book you wish to learn and hit the button to purchase it, you get taken into the Amazon app. Then it’s important to instantly return to the browser, navigate to Amazon, and purchase the e book through that route. Not unattainable — simply irritating.

By comparability, shopping for content material on an Android system felt such as you had been getting away with one thing. That’s as a result of, whereas Google anticipated apps to make use of Google’s personal billing system for buying digital items, it not often really enforced the expectation. It made Android an interesting various for these of us who spend means an excessive amount of time shopping for digital books on our gadgets. I went out and bought an Android E Ink pill partially as a result of I used to be excited to not have to leap by means of the hoops I needed to on iOS.

But Google is at the moment cracking down on app builders skirting round its guidelines. Starting June 1st, Google said it would remove apps that didn’t adjust to its billing system guidelines. This is why Amazon ended support for buying Audible audiobooks through the Android app on April 1st, 2022, and competitor Barnes & Noble ended help for getting digital books through its app on April 4th.

Oddly, in March, Google introduced a pilot program to let app builders use their very own billing techniques. The pilot program contains Spotify however not Amazon. That pilot program is probably going because of Google’s authorized battle with Epic Games. The billing system crackdown might not assist Google’s case, however a lot of Epic’s combat with Google is over the inconsistency with which it treats companions. Treating everybody the identical, even when it makes the person expertise worse, remains to be treating everybody the identical.