Almost a week ago, Amazon opened a virtual application store for Android terminals, but only today it implemented an extremely interesting function that, from the point of view of many, should implement and by Apple. Test Drive is a feature that allows users to test an app before purchasing it from Amazon's app store. For testing, a new window opens in the browser where you will have the screen of a terminal where a preview of the application will be loaded that users can use to understand how the application works. Everything is done in a window where we have Android emulated and we can surf the web, listen to music, perform many more functions than simply testing an application.
Clicking the "Test drive now" button launches a copy of this app on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a web service that provides on-demand compute capacity in the cloud for developers. When you click on the simulated phone using your mouse, we send those inputs over the Internet to the app running on Amazon EC2 – just like your mobile device would send a finger tap to the app. Our servers then send the video and audio output from the app back to your computer. All this happens in real time, allowing you to explore the features of the app as if it were running on your mobile device.
Apple has long been criticized for the lack of possibility to test an application before purchasing it and since Android Market and Amazon give this possibility, it is very possible that Apple will implement something similar in the near future. I don't know if there will be a system similar to the one in Amazon, but it would be great if users had the opportunity to test the application before actually buying it from the AppStore.
