Angry Birds RIO for Android will be an Amazon exclusive

 

Amazon has been making noise about a new app store for Google Android devices for a little while, but it remained to be seen whether the third party app store would gain any real traction. After all, would you rather just fire up the Android Market app that comes on your device to install apps and games, or download and install a separate app store from Amazon to do essentially the same thing? But now it looks like Amazon has found a pretty good incentive to get you to try its system: Rovio has announced that the upcoming Angry Birds RIO video game for Android will be available exclusively from Amazon’s Appstore.

Angry Birds is one of the most popular games for any mobile platform, with millions of users on Android, iOS, and webOS devices. Now it looks like if you want the next version of the game for Android, you’re going to have to install Amazon’s store on your device.

Rovio has been offering free, ad-supported versions of Angry Birds and Angry Birds Seasons through the Google Android Market for months, but has yet to offer ad-free paid apps for Android. In today’s announcement, the company also promised that ad-free versions of both games will be available soon. They’ll debut in the Amazon Appstore, but it’s likely that they’ll eventually be available fromt he Android Market.

Amazon hasn’t yet announced when its Appstore will be available for download, but Angry Birds RIO is a tie-in game for a new animated movie called RIO which is due out on April 15th. So it looks like we probably have less than a month to wait.

Update: Angry Birds Rio will be available on Mach 22nd, which means the Amazon Appstore could be open in the next week or so.

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