[ixian]

Like the new icon and the new name. Seems like a winner to me. Hoping Amazon lets it into the app store soon!

I do not think Amazon will ever support XBMC on the Fire because they can not generate any revenue from it. Just the opposite, they will lose revenue because most people will use XBMC rather than rent or buy videos from their site. Also they will lose what ever moneys they get from Netflix when someone rents a video.

I am also skeptical about whether Amazon will let an XBMC launcher into their app store. It may come down to how knowledgeable the person or team is about what XBMC can be used for. On one hand, it's nearly identical to PLEX in that it enables easy access to local content on your home PC. They appear to be OK with that. On the other hand, XBMC has a larger developer community and more add-ons. Of course PLEX also has several unsupported apps, but the development community for PLEX add-ons is much smaller than XBMC's.

So I think it will be an interesting test. They could argue that if they allow PLEX, why not an XBMC launcher? They could also dismiss XBMC and say they already allow PLEX so no one needs another tool to access local media. A generic launcher that allows devs to put their apps on the home screen shouldn't be out of the question. I mean it's not Apple, it's Android. So maybe something that launches apps after the user selects one from a menu of all installed apps the way Autopilot does gets it through. We will have to see. I just applaud who.is.matt for being the first to try!

People need to stop comparing XMBC and Plex in this context. The Plex app does no decoding of it's own. That is the biggest reason it's on the Amazon (and Play, etc) stores and XBMC isn't - the app doesn't contain any technology that is held as IP by some other company, like Dolby or MPEG-LA.

This is a huge difference and cannot be forgotten - the FireTV Plex app (which requires a separate back-end server to function) and XBMC are very different apps under the hood though they may appear to offer the same kind of functionality. People need to get it out of their heads that Plex is a "fork" of XBMC - that only applies to Plex Home Theater, the HTPC client (and even then only some of it) not the mobile apps or the back end server.

Anyway *that's* why Plex is on the store.

The potential problem with the XBMC on Fire launcher is that it's only purpose is to allow sideloaded apps the same home-screen access as store apps - and that may not even be a problem. We don't even know if Amazon cares about that - for all we know having to launch sideloaded apps through the settings menu is an oversight or something they plan to fix later. We do know they allow apps to be sideloaded, just like on the Fire tablets, so there's no issues there. So the real question we're all waiting to learn the answer to is: Will this app make it through? That will tell us a lot about what they think about sideloaded apps in general, i.e. are they deliberately making them second-class.

As for what XBMC actually does I am sure no one at Amazon cares, they aren't going to go out of their way to help it but I doubt it even registers on their radar.