Amazon recently announced that it is going to open its own store of applications in 200 new countries. One of them will be Russia. In connection with this announcement, we talked about the fate of Amazon with Opera.
The questions were answered by Viktor Shaburov, Opera Software Vice President for Opera Mobile Store Management.How serious is the competition in the Android store market in Russia today?
There is Google Play, there is Yandex.Store, there is a store from Opera, there is Samsung Apps, there is also GetUpps! from MegaFon, which is built on the basis of Yandex.Store. Is there room for another player?The biggest player in the Android market, of course, is Google.
The Opera mobile app store also occupies a significant share — more than 60 million monthly visitors in the world and almost 10 million visitors from CIS countries.
Amazon appstore is preinstalled on Kindle, where there are no other appstores. In fact, they have no problems with competition — rather, there is competition at the level of “hardware”: who will buy a Kindle instead of a tablet from another manufacturer, for example, Apple or Samsung.
What difficulties, apart from competition, will Amazon face?The main problem is the acceptance of payment: in Russia there is a low proportion of credit card holders and PayPal users.
This problem should be solved by integration with mobile operators, as Opera Mobile Store and Yandex do. In this case, all users of the operator will be able to purchase applications by paying it directly from their phone account.
In general, do you think Amazon will succeed with us?Amazon will certainly be able to successfully offer an appstore for Kindle users and make this tablet even more interesting.
