Earlier this week, Amazon retired its app for Windows phones, but its app for Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 PCs lived on. Indeed, it was also claimed that the company was working on a new app for Windows 10, and today, those claims were proved to be accurate.
As predicted, it"s a Hosted Web App, built using Microsoft"s Project Westminster app bridge, and it"s pretty clear that Amazon has put very little effort into its development.
At first launch, an optimistic pop-up notification will greet you, promising "a new and improved shopping app for Windows 10". But there"s not much to love in the app, given that it"s nothing more than a wrapper for its website.
Indeed, if you don"t make the window for the app wide enough, you"ll even see horizontal scrollbars where the website hangs off the edge. No responsive design layouts here.
For comparison, here"s what the Amazon website looks like running in a browser:
Additionally, Amazon has made no effort to implement platform-specific features into the app, such as Live Tile support, push notifications or Cortana integration - all of which, and more, are available for Project Westminster apps.
Such features might at least encourage users to download and use the app, but with no such implementation, it"s hard to see why users would go the trouble of installing it, rather than just visiting Amazon"s site in their browser.
The app is only available for Windows 10 PCs, with no support for Windows phones.
Download: Amazon app for Windows 10 (Windows Store) via MSPoweruser
Update: The app listing has now been updated on the Windows Store with availability for Windows 10 Mobile devices.
Additionally, it appears that the app does support Live Tile functionality after all. The tile will show you photos of what appears to be a completely random selection of products, with no information about them, and no way to find out about them. For some reason, these product images appear extremely small, in the top left, when the Live Tile is set to the "wide" size.
In our testing, we found the app showed us a watch, a "Little Panda" coin collecting bank, an Amazon Echo, and other completely random items. The usefulness of this functionality appears to be debatable.