LOOKOUT! It’s an App-alanche!
With multiple Kindles in our family and multiple Android devices, I’ve come across a little bit of an issue opportunity for Amazon to really improve something. Amazon needs to improve app management across users and multiple devices.
I’ve got an Android phone with the Amazon App Store application installed. I also have a Kindle Fire that’s obviously attached to the Amazon App store. I also have a standard Kindle that I got my daughter for Christmas, but resides under my account.
Here’s the problem. When my daughter downloads a book on her Kindle, it automatically gets prompted to be downloaded and available on mine. On the one hand, this can be a great feature. However, the vast majority of books my daughter is grabbing for her Kindle are not ones I want to have to flick through on my Kindle Fire to get to the books I want to read.
The other challenge is that when my daughter (or someone else in the family) decides they want to use my Kindle Fire and download an app, then that app gets pushed for download into my phone as well. Again, seemingly a good feature, but I need a better way to turn it off and tell it to stop trying to be helpful.
Here’s my solution:
- Provide a setting that will turn off the Whispernet syncing of apps and books across devices. This would allow it to be left on if desired for those users that want it or turned off for users like me who’d rather not.
- At the point of purchase of an app or book, be able to specify which devices should receive copies at that moment in time. Perhaps I would buy a book or app that I would like to be available on all my devices.
- Provide the ability to have sub-accounts under my main Amazon account that could then be assigned as primary users for any device that connects to the Amazon Marketplace. This would provide two levels of features:
- Ability to assign a user to a specific device as needed
- Ability to control what content is made available to a user on their device. For instance, my daughter is 9yrs old. It would be really good if I could block any kind of mature or undesired content from being both viewed and downloaded to her device at all.
