Amazon’s Appstore is turning 1 this week, and their celebration involves a week of staggered app deals. Some of the apps that Amazon will discount this week include Tetris, Monopoly, Fruit Ninja, and Jamie Oliver’s 20 Minute Meals.
Like I said, the deals will be staggered. Today’s deal is $2.00 (67%) off Plants vs. Zombies. Tomorrow, Amazon says they will unveil two more app deals, then three on day three – so on and so forth until the end of one week.
Amazon’s Appstore launched on March 22nd, 2011, and immediately drew fire from Apple who protested the use of the “Appstore” name. When it launched, it only contained about 4,000 apps. Now, that figure has grown to over 31,000.
“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.”
Along with the discounted app celebration, Amazon has also announced a sweepstakes involving Facebook that will come online at 1 pm EST today. Eight winners of that contest will receive a free Kindle Fire.
Amazon has also provided us with some stats about their Appstore:
- 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.