Amazon Lets You Try Apps Before You Buy Using an Android Virtual Machine

The Amazon Appstore lets you try apps before you purchase them using an Android Virtual Machine.

Clicking the "Test drive now" button launches a copy of this app on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a web service that provides on-demand compute capacity in the cloud for developers. When you click on the simulated phone using your mouse, we send those inputs over the Internet to the app running on Amazon EC2 - just like your mobile device would send a finger tap to the app. Our servers then send the video and audio output from the app back to your computer. All this happens in real time, allowing you to explore the features of the app as if it were running on your mobile device.

This is quite an impressive feature and hopefully could be implemented by other app stores such as Apple's and Microsoft's to provide customers with the opportunity to test drive apps before purchase.


Another interesting use for this technology would be accessing a virtual instant of your smartphone complete with all your data from another location.

Read More [via Engadget]