The reason Amazon’s phone has about a tenth as many apps as the
iPhone or Android phones is that, though it’s based on Android, Fire OS is heavily modified. For this sin,
Google GOOGL +0.77% has banned it from accessing the Google Play store, the official repository of Android apps.
Amazon is betting that developers will close this “app gap” quickly, and give the Fire all the capabilities its competitors have. But developers won’t jump on board with Fire OS unless people switch to it–and they probably won’t. It’s the classic chicken-and-egg problem of building an ecosystem of software around any particular piece of hardware.