Try Apps In Amazon's App Store - Virtualized Android

With the recent release of the Amazon App Store, Amazon has brought one new feature that no App Store has even tried to implement yet... a live preview of an app before you buy!

The thing with buying all of these apps is that most of the time, you really don't know what you're getting in the long run. You buy an app based upon the reviews, most of the time, and determine whether you like it yourself or not.

We've been living with this same App Store features over and over again. Now with what Amazon just did, this is going to leave quite a bit of competition for Apple's iOS App Store.

Essentially, what Amazon did was create a live simulator (that apparently runs on Ubuntu - more below), and make it so that anyone can try an app right from their browser!

Clicking the “Test drive now” button launches a copy of this app on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a web service that provides on-demand compute capacity in the cloud for developers. When you click on the simulated phone using your mouse, we send those inputs over the Internet to the app running on Amazon EC2 — just like your mobile device would send a finger tap to the app. Our servers then send the video and audio output from the app back to your computer. All this happens in real time, allowing you to explore the features of the app as if it were running on your mobile device. - Source: Amazon's Test Drive Now section

We've all heard of the powerful EC2, but using it for something like this is brilliant! So basically, it's VNC for testing apps! I'm hoping Amazon's servers will be able to handle this. We've seen how Amazon's servers can handle the toughest of traffic, so all should be well!

How about some fancy photos? As you can see, it behaves just like a real Android phone! And apparently it's running 2.2.1 on the Ubuntu kernel! Got to love open source software!

So what do you think about Amazon's implementation? Quite honestly, I think they did an amazing job! Now let's see Apple try to do something like this! They do have the data center for it!