Pandigital Goes Belly Up, Amazon Offers In-App Purchasing To Developers

Remember Pandigital? It is true that the company never became a major player in the e-reader business but its devices did catch our attention from time to time. Its tablets were on the lower-end side. Unfortunately, low-end tablets that don’t deliver a whole lot of value these days are doomed to fail. Pandigital has now gone bankrupt. We never recommended anyone buying Pandigital tablets. But those who have will probably not get any support for their devices anymore. Pandigital is not the first company to go bankrupt in this business and won’t be the last. With the Kindle Fire, NOOK HD, Nexus 7, and other budget tablets dominating the market, small players are going to have a very difficult time staying afloat.

Speaking of the Kindle Fire, Amazon is finally allowing developers to use in-app purchasing to generate revenue for their business. Amazon is also offering GameCircle features to third-party developers. It is accomplishing this by offering Unity plugin-ins to Kindle Fire developers.

Unity is one of the most popular tools for building mobile games…Amazon’s In-App Purchasing and GameCircle APIs help developers reach more customers, keep them engaged, and make more money. Every week millions of customers are playing GameCircle enabled games and are able to compare scores and compete against friends. We want to make it as easy as possible for developers to quickly integrate these features and our new, free plugins make it incredibly simple to do so for anyone using Unity.

explained Mike Frazzini, Director of Amazon Games. This means developers will now be able to publish their games to the Amazon Appstore easily and get paid through in-app purchases. The Whispersync technology will be available for their games as well. It will be interesting to see how successful this will be.