Thought Amazon was moving out of the Windows phone space for good? Think not. We reached out to Amazon in response to their announcement that they are retiring their current Windows Phone app as it did not provide the “best customer experience”. The response received provides insight into what Amazon is planning, although, specific details are quite vague.
Originally, we contacted customer support to see what they would say, however, they had no information on future product roadmaps and instead passed our message on to their internal apps team, who responded with the following:
As many customers are asking for an improved Amazon App for Windows Phone, we have to launch [a] new app.
Please rest assured our team is working on the new app. It may take some time but we will definitely get the new app soon.
We’ll soon be retiring the App you currently have on your Windows Phone, meaning its contents will no longer be updated. You’ll still have access to the App until 15 August 2016.
I’m sorry for any disappointment this may cause.
To further confirm this, we tried reaching out to the separate apps customer support team, who responded with this:
We are already working on it, and we will directly update you via email once it’s complete.
In terms of details on the upcoming app, they are scarce. It is not clear if this will be another Windows Phone 8+ app or a Universal Windows App that would also support Windows 10 PC and Mobile. The good news, however, is that Amazon are not leaving its customers on Windows phones in the dark and their development teams are already working on a new app and have said that affected customers will receive an email when the new app is ready, which will be arriving “soon”.
Amazon working on an improved app comes as no surprise. The company’s slogan is for being “customer-centric” and providing a good customer experience is core to this goal. The current Windows Phone app did not meet its customers needs and wants, so the company retiring the current app while it works on a new one makes sense, whilst directing customers to the inferior experience on amazon.com/.co.uk in the meantime.
Further to confirmation from Amazon themselves, a Microsoft employee who works with the company’s large enterprise clients also stated that apps disappearing from the Windows Store are usually being re-built as Universal Windows Apps, which was stated in response to Amazon’s announcement of them retiring their app.
We’ll let you know of any further developments on Amazon for Windows 10 Mobile and Windows Phone.
