Amazon expands mobile ambitions with Cloud Drive apps

That app is available on iOS and Android, and the service is also built into Amazon‘s Fire Phone.

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Before the launch of the Cloud Drive app for iOS this weekend, Amazon allowed users to access content from the cloud service through various apps such as Amazon Photos (aka Cloud Drive Photos) and Amazon Prime Music.

To support its ever expanding cloud storage competitor to the already existing storage services available such as, Google Drive, Dropbox and others. Amazon also offers enterprise-oriented cloud storage and file sharing through Amazon WorkDocs. The suite of apps has an emphasis on productivity and it is intended as an all-purpose complement to the Amazon’s previous music and photo specific apps.

Cloud Drive provides users with folder views of everything they have stored in Amazon’s cloud. Subscribers of Amazon Prime can even get this plan for free. Another plan option offers 5GB storage for all files and unlimited photo storage for $12 per year. Read 10 Great Websites For Learning Programming. Google sells extra storage for $2/month per 100GB or $10/month per 1TB. The users can also stream stored music and videos. But in an email, an Amazon spokesperson said that there are no size limits on Cloud Drive mobile or Web uploads, and that the documentation will be corrected. For instance, Amazon still doesn’t offer a proper desktop sync app, so the only way to add files from a computer is through a drag-and-drop interface. Another flaw is that these apps do not allow users to edit and synchronize documents on the go via tablets or smartphones, while Amazon’s rival Microsoft offers such benefits to users. It’s not much of an organizational tool, however. Or you can grab a link to a file if you want to share it publicly, like posting it on social media, for example.

Why this matters: Cloud storage could become a killer app for Amazon, with low prices and helpful tie-ins to the company’s other devices and services.