Develop Android Apps with Amazon Web Services

Many native Android apps use server-side components to accomplish tasks such as deliver content, manage access control or share data between users. With Amazon Web Services (AWS), developers can easily access a scalable and cost-effective cloud computing infrastructure for their mobile applications. Best of all, all AWS services are available on a pay-as-you-go pricing model with no up-front investment.

Read on for some examples of the types of Android applications that best leverage the AWS cloud offering (social, media, gaming, business apps, etc.) and watch the video to see how you can get started today:

Here are some good examples of the types of Android applications that best leverage the AWS cloud offering:

Social, Gaming and Media Apps

• A social game that shares moves, high scores, statistics, geo-location, and other user data between devices using Amazon SimpleDB, a key-value store, non-relational database, with useful query functionality.
• A media application that uploads photos, videos, and more to Amazon S3, a highly-durable and highly-available internet storage solution, built for easy web access. These Amazon S3 buckets can be connected to our world-wide distribution through Amazon CloudFront, a world-wide content delivery network, to help ensure minimum latency, regardless of where the end-users are accessing the content served by your application.
• A photo community that allows users to upload photos and then apply photography filters to them. The image processing and resizing can be done using Amazon EC2 virtualized server resources. Final photos or works in progress can be stored in Amazon S3 for highly-durable and highly-available storage, and the photo files can be connected to our content distribution network, Amazon CloudFront.
• An ad server that runs on our virtualized server resource, Amazon EC2, and can query Amazon SimpleDB to access user stats.

Cross-Device Applications

• End-users might own both a tablet and a phone. To help them easily access the same information and maintain one identity across different devices, developers can store user accounts and stats in Amazon SimpleDB.
• A messaging client that broadcasts messages between devices, developers can use Amazon SQS and Amazon SNS, without requiring any additional server infrastructure.

Business Applications

• An application that manages meetings, meeting notes, files, tasks, etc. that would require a managed relational database such as Amazon RDS and a host of other AWS products.

All these applications can access AWS resources through our AWS SDK for Android or with simple API calls.

Get Started

September 7 - November 15: Android developers who submit an app that is approved to the Amazon Appstore for Android through October 15 will receive a $50 promotional code towards the use of AWS products and services. Developers who submit a verified app in September, will receive the promotion code during the first week of October. Developers who submit a verified app in October or the beginning of November, will receive the promotion code during the last week of November. Each promotion code will be unique to each recipient.

The Amazon Appstore Developer Program enables developers to sell apps on Amazon.com. By joining this program, developers are able to market their apps to tens of millions of Amazon customers using Amazon’s proven marketing features. In addition, developers can manage their apps using convenient self-service account management tools.

How To Get Started

• Sign up for a developer account with the Amazon Appstore for Android.
• Upload your application to the Amazon Appstore for Android.
• $50 promotional codes will be emailed during the first week of October or the last week of November 2011.
• If you haven’t received your promotional code have questions, reach out to us: aws-appstore-promo@amazon.com

Terms and Conditions

• All AWS promotion codes are subject to the terms and conditions found here: http://aws.amazon.com/awscredits/
• Only eligible developers are eligible for this promotion.
• Before issuing the promotion code, the Amazon Appstore will verify that the app is a valid Android application package and is publishable on the Amazon Appstore.
• You must submit your app to the Amazon Appstore between 12:01 am (PDT) on September 6, 2011 and 11:59 pm (PDT) on November 15, 2011 to be eligible to receive the promotion code.
• Your AWS promotion code will be sent to the e-mail address associated with your Amazon Appstore Developer Portal account either during the first week of October or the last week of November 2011.
• The promotion code expires on December 31, 2011 at 11:59 p.m. (PST). After redeeming the promotion code, the credit will be automatically applied to your future eligible purchases until the credit balance is used or until the credit expires (whichever comes first).
• The promotion code may be used only once.
• Limit one promotion code per developer and per Appstore developer account email address.
• To redeem the promotion code, you must have an AWS account and accept the terms and conditions of the AWS Customer Agreement, located at http://aws.amazon.com/agreement.
• The following are the eligible services offered by AWS:
  • Amazon ElastiCache
  • Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
  • Amazon Elastic MapReduce
  • Amazon CloudFront
  • Amazon Relational Database Service(RDS)
  • Amazon Route 53
  • Amazon SimpleDB
  • Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)
  • Amazon Simple Notification Service(SNS)
  • Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
  • Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
  • AWS Elastic Beanstalk