Amazon says it has fixed an issue with its Amazon Appstore that was causing issues with app launches for customers who had upgraded to Android 12 on their mobile devices. Earlier this month, reports began to circulate that Amazon’s Appstore was still not functional on Android 12 following its fall release. Users reported that not only did the Appstore itself not work, the apps and games they had installed from the Appstore also no longer worked.
The company had been responding to customer complaints in Amazon’s digital and device forums, only to say that its technical team was still investigating the issue. But things came to a head when an article by Liliputing.com detailing the problems got traction and was picked up by a wider range of news sites, forcing Amazon to publicly comment on the matter. It then said it was working on a fix that impacted “app performance and launches” that had affected the “small number of Amazon Appstore users that have upgraded to Android 12.” The company noted at the time the issue didn’t impact Amazon Fire TV devices or Amazon Fire tablets.
On Friday, Amazon said a fix has gone live, but did not detail what had gone wrong or how the issues had been addressed, more specifically.
“We have released a fix for an issue impacting app launches for Amazon Appstore customers that have upgraded to Android 12 on their mobile devices,” a company spokesperson said, in a statement shared with media. “We are contacting customers with steps to update their Appstore experience. We are sorry for any disruption this has caused,” they added.
There had been some speculation that the issues with the Appstore had been related to its built-in DRM and Android 12, given that one of the workarounds a user discovered involved decompiling the Android app APK file then commenting out the lines related to the DRM, among other technical steps. (Clearly, this was not a fix mainstream users could take advantage of, however.)
Amazon’s failure to address this issue for multiple weeks highlights how little traction its Appstore has on Android devices, where few users see any need to buy apps outside of Google Play, as well as how slow the Android upgrade cycle can be. It simply was not a priority for Amazon to address the issues with any sense of urgency, it seemed.
These days, Amazon’s focus with its Appstore is instead on how it can be used to deliver apps to Windows 11 users. Microsoft and Amazon this year agreed to partner on a new initiative that would allow Amazon to offer its third-party app store on the Microsoft Store, allowing Windows users to download Android apps to their PCs.
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