Amazon Killing Mobile Apps That Use Its Data

[sitenoise]

Uh oh!

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/07/am ... -its-data/

[jenv]

By Amazon's reasoning it should.

[Conor]

Pocketpedia was one of the 530 apps that launched with the App Store. At the time there was no mention of mobile in the API, but it appeared sometime in the fall of last year when I can only assume they started work on their own iPhone app. It's our responsibility to monitor the agreement but of course it's tough to stay informed of all the changes. We only found out about it later that year when we got an email from a fellow developer who wanted to do some cool things on the iPhone with the API and wanted to know how to get permission. He had come across it when he read the agreement for the first time in the fall. Since then we have been waiting for the Amazon email to stop making Pocketpedia available for distribution. Since Pocketpedia had already been in the store for 6 months, we shifted development to catch up with our to do list on the desktop Pedias but could not bring ourselves to remove Pocketpedia as it's such a great app that we where quite proud of. When we started focusing on Pocketpedia again to include the two way sync, improve the firewall blocking issue, expand the internal search, work on the edit ability and many more refinements. Even though Delicious Library is our competitor we are sad to see them have to remove their app. It is the lack of alternatives (or no option at all if we have to pull Pocketpedia) for an iPhone catalog app that will make the iPhone OS platform a poorer place. We love the Amazon API, it has created an entire ecosystem of thousand of useful desktop and web apps and on their side made them the default online shopping portal. We hate to see Amazon go the way of the App Store and become a more closed system instead of embracing the more open philosophy of their other information services. It is a service they provide and they have the final word. But if there is one person who can make a big fuss it's Wil Shipley, lets hope it results in a change of the policy. For now we are going to hold off on our planned update.

[adrianwright]

Hi Conor,

Sorry to hear about this.

Hope you do not mind, I have sent you a message regarding the beta as I have some minor issues when synching back to DVDPedia.

Regards


Adrian

[sjk]

Daring Fireball Linked List: SnapTell Was Acquired by Amazon in June speculates:

Perhaps this is why Amazon is refusing to allow mobile apps to use their APIs or data. They want to do it all themselves.

I sure hope Pocketpedia development continues, with or without Amazon support (which, honestly, is currently useless to me).

[jenv]

I just saw today that Barnes & Noble has an iPhone app. Looks like a bad trend. The thing that bugs me is that Amazon's and B&N's apps are search apps, but DL and *Pedia are catalog apps. They don't really compete with each other.

[thajeztah]

@sjk
I agree, PocketPedia is a very useful app even without amazon as (especially with the planned two-way-sync), it's the only way to manage my collections 'on the road'

@conor
Would it be an idea to switch to 'open source'/'community' data, like discogs.com for music? I see that they do provide an api:
http://www.discogs.com/help/api. Although not as up to date as amazon, discogs gets better all the time.

I really hope the planned update will still find it's way to the AppStore

[Conor]

The latest CDpedia includes the DiscoGS API, it's quite useful and well done and we will be writing a blog post about the 4.5 release talking about DiscoGS. The new wave of APIs appearing on different databases for data communication provides great opportunities for us developers and number of options for users. Amazon is still the best source, hopefully API adoption will be even greater in the future.

[warhol]

is this already being enforced ?

i'm adding to cdpedia this afternoon & i'm not getting any results from amazon uk. all my cd searches for ASIN numbers are being found at amazon.fr - and so all the descriptive texts are in french too.

am i doing something wrong ? (amazon uk is top of my search priority list, followed by amazon us.)

[Conor]

CDpedia is not a mobile app so it's not related to the above. I tested some ASIN with Amazon UK and had no problems, could you provide us some sample searches that you are doing that are failing. Also try explicitly setting "Amazon UK" in the search site pop-up instead of cascade (although if it's your first listed site then it should not make a difference, but it's still worth a try for debugging).

[Conor]

Update: Sadly Pocketpedia also had to be removed.

[sitenoise]

So what will happen to the app we're using now? will it get nuked in an update or will it continue to function until manually removed? Personally I don't care about Amazon searches but LOVE having my collection on my iPhone.

[Nora]

The Pocketpedia you have on your iPhone/iPod Touch now will stay on your device until you remove it manually. We're upset that we couldn't release the new version as planned because the two-way sync was finally working as we wanted it to and there were other nice features included too. (Bittersweet - Apple just upped our number of allowed beta testers but unfortunately too late since we already had to pull Pocketpedia from the App Store and beta testing is not running anymore.)

[Midori]

Will you offer a lighter version without the search? I would be interested, especially if there is series / number in series support for bookpedia (think "belgian comics", ...)

Midori

[ltcarter47]

This is really sad. I love the work you guys did on PocketPedia. I remember being so excited when I came across it when the app store opened. Hopefully Amazon eventually realizes this is a bad move and reverses it.