Amazon Internet browser app launched in India: All you need to know

Amazon has released a lite internet browser app for Android devices in India. This app is touted to be lighter than the other rival web browser apps. It is called 'Internet' and is designed to consume less space on the smartphone. As its name indicates, this app measures under 3MB in size. The app is available for download on the Google Play Store and runs on devices running Android 6.0 Marshmallow or higher.

Like the other web browsers such as Google Chrome, the Amazon Internet also features a home page with an integrated section for trending news. The app has tab previews as in the rival apps and enables automatic full-screen mode as well. It has an option to switch to the private tabs in order to let users hide the browsing history from their devices. This app joins the other lite apps available in India.

Assures privacy

The Internet app is touted to offer a great level of privacy. It is said that this app will not ask for additional permissions and will not collect private data as the other browsers in the market. So, users can enjoy a private user experience with this browser app. There is support for incognito mode too in this app.

Unavailable on Play Store

Spotted initially by TechCrunch, this app is available only in India but users of Xiaomi and OnePlus devices can't download it now. Though the app is said to work well on Android devices running Marshmallow or above, we were not able to download the app from the Play Store on any of our smartphones despite running the latest version of the OS. We tried downloading this app on Honor 7X, Xiaomi Redmi Y1 and OnePlus 5 but we couldn't. Maybe, Amazon is rolling it in a phased manner.

Why Amazon Internet?

The big question is why did Amazon want to launch an internet browser app? Notably, this is not the first one to be launched by the company. Already, the company released the Kindle Lite app offering a basic e-book reading experience without consuming much storage space. It can work with slower data speeds and even in regions with unstable connectivity.

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The other issue is that the Internet app aimed at the India consumers does not support local languages. And, it is in no way better than the other browser apps bundled with smartphones. So, we wonder why the company has come up with this 'lite' browser app. One thing we can infer is that Amazon could be aiming to compete with Facebook and Google with a slew of lite apps such as Facebook Lite, Messenger Lite, Gmail Go, Google Go, YouTube Go and more.