14 DAY TRIAL // Amazon has recently decided to say goodbye to Windows Phone by pulling its app from the store, and now the company is going one step further and is pulling the Kindle modern app originally designed for Windows 8 and released in 2012.
The company announced today that it would remove the Kindle app from the Windows Store on October 27, and then focus exclusively on the PC version, which provides almost the same functionality.
“For the past few years Amazon has supported two separate Kindle apps for Windows PCs. In order to provide our Windows customers with the best Kindle reading experience, we are simplifying our approach and focusing our efforts on the Kindle for PC app,” Amazon said in an announcement.
You can continue using it… with no updates
Users who have already installed the app can continue running it normally, but in case they remove it from their devices, the download links will no longer be available. Amazon says that nobody will be able to download the modern app from the store, and although some would continue running it, updates and improvements would no longer be released.
“If you are currently using our other Windows app (Kindle for Windows 8) on one or more of your PCs, we recommend that you upgrade to the Kindle for PC app to get the best reading experience and latest Kindle features. We are regularly updating the Kindle for PC app, including recent features like multi-color highlighting, improved search performance, and support for textbooks,” the company adds.
Amazon says that this decision is part of its plans to simplify the offering on Windows platforms, but the company seems to gradually step away from Microsoft’s modern operating systems.
Earlier this year, the firm pulled the Windows Phone app and replaced it with another version that’s more of a web wrapper based on Project Centennial, and now it’s giving up on the Kindle app too. The whole Store app push seems to be a failed experiment for Amazon, but fortunately, the Win32 version is still there with more than a billion users.