Amazon Fire Phone's Ironic Application Problem

Before Amazon's Fire Phone became available, Amazon made it known that it was amassing over 240,000 new apps for its Appstore. Ironically, you will not find many key apps on the company's consumer-driven phone.

The essentials are present: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Swarm and Uber for example.

The best way to take fully take advantage of the Amazon Fire's apps is to install them outside of the preferred method of the preinstalled Appstore. You do this by launching the settings app on your Fire Phone, then tapping on "Allow non-Amazon app installation". You will receive a warning after doing so, and if you're comfortable with taking responsibility for what you load, then just click OK.

To find Android apps, just use Chrome extension to download the APK for free apps to your desktop.

Only problem with the Fire Phone is that because Amazon heavily customized Android to fit its needs, many Google apps end up not working, like Starbucks and Foursquare for example.

The Fire Phone is an extension of Amazon's original environment, which is centered on their products; Amazon music, video and books. Otherwise, it is just like an iPhone, which is also centered on consumption of Apple content.

The phone comes with a year of prime membership, free of charge. Dialing up movies is easy with the phone thanks to its tight integration with prime.

At the heart of Amazon's strategy is the Fire-fly app, which allows one to turn the phone into a shop window from the click of a button. Point at a product, and it will find it instantly on Amazon, adding it to your shopping basket.

This consumer concentrated effort with technology has been Amazon's primary goal for years now, with their Kindle being the prime example, sending its users to purchase heavy amounts of books from the Kindle Bookstore.