Apple’s lawsuit against Amazon over the use of the term “app store” to describe Amazon’s… store for Android applications will likely take a few years to resolve in the courts. But things are looking good for Amazon in the US, where a judge recently declined to grant Apple a preliminary injunction. In other words, it’s business as usual for the Amazon Appstore in the US right now.
Germany, though, is a different story. SplatF discovered that Amazon has been sending letters to developers in that country letting them know that it will temporarily be unable to accept app submissions from Germans.
The Amazon Appstore currently only allows Android phone and tablet users in the United States to purchase and download apps, but developers in a number of countries can submit applications. You just can’t do it from Germany for now.
Apple has trademarked the term “App Store” to refer to its service for selling mobile phone and tablet applications. Competitors insist that the phrase is generic, since it simply describes a type of store, but Apple has resisted that argument.
To be fair, many of the stores that do sell apps for Android and other platforms manage to exist without using the phrase “app store” in their names. On the other hand, it seems a bit silly to claim that consumers will confuse the Amazon Appstore, which only sells Android apps with Apple’s iTunes app store, which only sells iOS apps.
But Apple has been marketing the App Store pretty hard lately with a new line of commercials suggesting “if you don’t have the app store,” that you don’t have access to the hundreds of thousands of apps available for iOS. I suppose what the company is really trying to protect is the idea that there are more high quality apps for iOS than there are for Android or other platforms, whether or not that’s actually the case.
