Amazon this week beefed up the app selection on new Fire Phone, and one of the more high-profile additions is Microsoft's Skype.
"We've been working with Amazon over the last couple of years to bring Skype to its Kindle Fire HD and HDX tablets, and we're delighted to announce that Skype will be available on Fire phone when it becomes available later this month," Microsoft's Skype team wrote in a blog post Tuesday.
Microsoft tweaked its Skype for Android app to match the Fire Phone look and feel. A widget visible from Fire's carousel will let you see chats and notifications at a glance, without having to launch the Skype app.
Amazon on Tuesday announced a number of apps that will be available on its 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. Amazon also recently released a new Android and Fire Phone app, dubbed Amazon Wallet, which lets you scan gift, reward, and loyalty cards with your phone and save them in the Amazon cloud for easy access.
Security firm AVG is also releasing two free Fire Phone apps — Alarm Clock Xtreme and AntiVirus PRO. The alarm clock app will let you use simple hand gestures to do things like snooze or turn off the alarm or stopwatch.
The expanded app selection is good news, considering one of the primary complaints about 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 review of the Amazon Fire Phone and Amazon Fire Phone vs. Samsung Galaxy S5: Specs Compared.