Amazon announces slew of new services for developers

July 10, 2014, 5:52 PM UTC
Technology
contract armin harris
Kyle Bean for Fortune

Amazon announced Thursday multiple new programs for its Amazon Web Services product designed to allow developers to more easily build mobile applications.

The services announced by Amazon (AMZN) include Cognito, Mobile Analytics and SNS. Additionally, Zocalo, a new storage and sharing service was released at the company’s summit held in New York.

The capabilities of the new products include:

  • Amazon Cognito, which allows developers to store, manage and sync identities and data. For example, the user logging on to the app starts as an unauthenticated guest, but then can sign into Amazon, Facebook and Google to gain full access to the features provided by the app, syncing the user’s data on all platforms.
  • Amazon Mobile Analytics, meanwhile, does just what the name states: lets the developer track users, revenue and the way in which consumers engage with the product.
  • Amazon SNS gives developers the opportunity to send notifications to multiple devices, including Apple iOS, Google Android and Kindle Fire.

Marco Argenti, the vice president for Amazon’s mobile services, said in a statement that the new products and services announced on Thursday benefit developers through “even simpler” and “more cost-effective” means to “build and scale mobile apps” going forward.

He added that the process of building apps will now become more streamlined when using Amazon Work Services.

Along with newly implemented features listed above, Amazon Zocalo is touted as an “enterprise storage and sharing service” that helps “improve user productivity.” The product reportedly helps users access documents, presentations, PDFs and more via mobile devices.

Citing customers “fed up” with costs and complexity associated with other “collaboration management tools,” Noah Eisner, the general manager for the new product, said in a statement that the new platform will allow Amazon users to collaborate more quickly. “That’s what Amazon Zocalo was built to do,” he added.

At the summit, Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogel said in the keynote address: “Building mobile first apps means that you have to have a solid idea of the customer, you have to build engaging apps, and you have to measure relentlessly if you want to build better apps for your customers. But measuring on a mobile device is not easy.” The new services are meant to combat those issues.