Have a ton of gift, reward, and loyalty cards taking up space in your wallet? Amazon wants to help.
The online retail giant has quietly released a new Android and Fire Phone app, dubbed Amazon Wallet, which lets you scan those cards with your phone and save them in the Amazon cloud, so they're easily accessible when you need them. "Wherever you are, the information you need is easily available as a barcode, QR code, text or image," according to the app's description.
On the down side, the app doesn't support mobile payments or credit and debit cards. At this point, it's still in beta, so it's possible Amazon will add these features in the future to bring the app up to par with Google Wallet. Head over to Google Play to download Amazon Wallet now.
Meanwhile on the app front, Amazon on Tuesday announced a number of new apps for the Fire Phone, including: Craigslist, eBay, Fandango, Kik, the news streaming service Trove, TV Guide, and WhitePages as well as games like Rubik's Cube, action-adventure thriller République, and puzzler Amazing. The company said that Amazon Appstore selection has nearly tripled over the past year and the rate of app submissions has more than doubled since the Fire Phone launched.
The expanded app selection is good news, considering one of the primary complaints about the Fire phone is its limited app selection compared to other Android phones. Amazon's handset runs Android, but doesn't have access to the Google Play Store and lacks popular Google apps that come pre-installed on other devices, like Google Maps, Google Search, the Chrome browser, and YouTube.
For more, see PCMag's Hands On With the Amazon Fire Phone and Amazon Fire Phone vs. Samsung Galaxy S5: Specs Compared.