William Gallagher
The new Amazon Prime Video app is a native Mac one, available through the Mac App Store, and which allows users to buy films and TV directly.
Amazon has had a Prime Video app for iOS and tvOS for some years, but now it's launched a new version for Macs. Seemingly coded in Swift, its version number of 9.00.33 is slightly older than the iPhone one's 9.00.7963.5, which was updated 24 hours before.
Presumably as part of Apple's deal to get Amazon Prime onto the App Store, users do not have to subscribe via Apple's regular in-app purchases. They can instead sign up to Amazon Prime within the app, just as they can then buy films and TV through it.
If a user is already a Prime member, and so has an existing credit card associated with the account, that card is displayed and can be selected.
Amazon says that the video will include live sports, "including Thursday Night Football and the English Premiere league (where available)." It's also possible now to start watching on Mac, then switch to Apple TV or iOS and resume playback from the same point.
Prime Video is free to download from the App Store. It requires macOS Big Sur or later. An Amazon Prime subscription costs $12.99 per month.
Malcolm Owen
Charles Martin
Christine McKee
Wesley Hilliard
Andrew Orr
7 Comments
Big Sur or later? Can we assume it’s M1 native? I can already hear the rage from users of older machines running Catalina on down. Paying the price for sticking put on old hardware and software. Meanwhile I wait for the larger M1 iMac to replace my ‘vintage?’ late 2013 14,2 iMac.
At the moment, on the Mac App Store, the button just says "Purchased", but it is greyed out. I have never downloaded this app and it is not in my Applications folder.
Great! Amazon app is quite basic on tvOS and iPhoneOS but I'm happy to see it on macOS too
I'm tempted to try it. They get a privacy rating of 60%, which is much better than Netflix's 46%, but still quite shy of Apple's 79%. I wonder why Apple gets only 79%. I guess I'll have to read its report.
https://privacy.commonsense.org/evaluation/Amazon-Prime-Video <--
Just downloaded it to try. It won’t go full screen. Both the menu command and the green dot are grayed out. MacBook Pro late 2013, but running latest version of Big Sur.