Angry Birds developer Rovio announced on its Facebook account a couple of hours ago that “AT&T can also be engaged on enabling purchases from the Amazon Appstore soon,” which might mark a fairly large move on AT&T’s part since they’ve been firm of their resolve to maintain apps from outside the Android Market ecosystem off their branded Android devices — a frustrating (and arguably illogical) stance, to assert the least. Well, first the excellent news — AT&T has confirmed to us that they’re, in reality, putting in access to Amazon’s store:
“We’re working to offer our Android customers access to 3rd party application stores. This requires updates to our systems and finalizing arrangements with Amazon. We shall share more info with our customers inside the near future.”
The bad news is that AT&T’s having any discussions with Amazon about this in any respect, which might appear to indicate that they’re planning on making an exception to their Android Market policy for the Amazon Appstore in preference to simply enabling sideloading on devices altogether and calling it an afternoon. We suppose this will involve a round of firmware updates that drops the Appstore in ROM, but that appears like a lot of labor considering how much red tape is considering pushing even a single update for one handset on a big carrier. More in this as we get it; hopefully, AT&T subscribers can have their Angry Birds Rio fix soon enough.
[Thanks, Thomas]
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