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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Amazon is reportedly developing a new Fire Phone.
- The previous model had several issues, including an inferior app store experience.
- Under new supervision (and with more experience), Amazon can do better this time.
Well, I don’t know about you, but I certainly didn’t have “new Amazon smartphone” on my 2026 bingo card. As it turns out, according to Reuters, the retailer may be developing a new smartphone, internally known as “Transformer.”
Those familiar with the industry will instantly draw parallels to Amazon’s previous smartphone effort, the Fire Phone from 2014. Appropriately, that phone ended up as part of a fire sale about a year later.
The original Fire Phone is still burned in our minds
Now, in 2026, with no fewer than five phone brands in the US — Apple, Samsung, Google, Motorola, and OnePlus — Amazon faces a lot of competition. In fairness, it also has two fewer platforms to compete against. In 2014, Windows Phone and BlackBerry were still very much part of the smartphone conversation; these days, not so much.
Also: What’s right (and wrong) with the Amazon Fire Phone
But there’s one mistake Amazon made in its first effort that will absolutely torpedo its chances at succeeding — the Amazon AppStore and specifically the decision to forego Google Play services. Google is simply too valuable in too many lives to not support the platform. Oh, and the Amazon AppStore is terrible.
It has admittedly been a few years since I last inventoried the Amazon AppStore, but when I last checked, the Amazon AppStore was a wasteland of half-supported or unsupported apps, with two notable exceptions. Finance, home control, and communication apps were either absent or had not received updates for years prior.
The only apps in the Amazon AppStore that remained up to date were productivity apps (largely powered by Microsoft) and streaming apps. Those two categories work very well on the cheap, underpowered hardware that Amazon usually launches, and that’s fine. A coffee-table tablet is a nice thing to have lying around.
A spark of hope
But a phone is another animal entirely. If a tablet is a device to entertain, a phone is a device for everything else. One of the key reasons Windows Phone failed was its lack of an app ecosystem. The Senior Vice President of Devices and Services, Panos Panay, is very familiar with that saga, so I’m hopeful that he will make the same arguments to the powers that be at Amazon.
Honestly, if there is anyone who I think can pull off an Amazon phone revival, it’s probably Panay, who understands design and product development better than most, and to be perfectly honest, he’s my absolute favorite product presenter.
Also: Amazon Fire Phone review: Not a great smartphone
Of course, all of this is early days. This phone is being worked on internally, and even Reuters reports that it could get the axe long before it sees the light of day. Personally, I’m intrigued by the idea, but I sincerely hope that Amazon doesn’t make this the shopping phone it tried to build in 2014.
If Amazon just wants to make a nice, well-built smartphone, with a skin that pushes Amazon content to the fore, I’m fine with that. But leaving Google behind is a mistake that Amazon cannot afford to make again. Fool me once, and all that.
So, if this phone is to have a chance at success, it needs to embrace Google services so it can be a phone that everyone can use. Amazon has the brand power to make a phone like this work, even up against juggernauts like Apple and Samsung, but it needs to approach this correctly, lest it end up in yet another Fire phone fire sale.
