Amazon Appstore Now Allows You To 'Test Drive' Apps on Your Android Handset

If you’re an Android user and you’re yet to try out the Amazon Appstore, now is the perfect time to sign up. Thanks to its new ‘Test Drive’ feature, you can now use over 5,000 Android applications on your handset before you commit to making a purchase. The best part is, you don’t even have to wait for them to install.

While browsing the Appstore on your device, just hit the Test Drive button within the app’s description and within seconds you’ll be able to take it for a spin. Nothing is downloaded to your handset until you decide you want to make a purchase.

Customers click the “Test Drive” button on an app product page and in seconds, they can use their phone’s touch screen and accelerometer to control the app, simulating the experience of the app running on their phone.  Test Drive provides customers with the experience of running an app for the first time, as if it were freshly installed.  Customers can purchase or download the app at any point during the Test Drive experience.

Of course, if you’re already an Amazon Appstore user, you’ll probably be aware that the Test Drive feature has been available for some time. But until now, you had to test applications within a web browser on your computer; this is the first time you can test them directly on your Android handset — where the majority of us do our app shopping.

So how does Test Drive work, and why don’t you need to download anything? Amazon explains:

Amazon brings the Test Drive experience to Amazon.com and Android phones using the massive server fleet that comprises the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a web service that provides on-demand compute capacity in the cloud for developers.  When customers click the Test Drive button, we launch a copy of the app on EC2. As customers interact with the app, we send those inputs over the phone’s WiFi Internet connection to the app running on Amazon EC2.  Our servers then send the video and audio output from the app back to the customer’s computer or phone. All this happens in real time, allowing customers to explore the features of the app as if it were running locally on their mobile device.

Test Drive on Android handsets is currently still in beta, but anyone can take advantage of it simply by installing the latest version of the Amazon Appstore (2.6.53). Unfortunately, the Appstore is still only available to customers in the United States.

Have you tried the Appstore’s new Test Drive feature yet?

[via Cult of Android]