Over the years, many companies have ventured into the smartphone industry, though only a small fraction became successful enough to continue producing mobile devices. Back in 2014, Amazon tried to develop its own spin on Android devices, and despite its immense potential, the Fire Phone was plagued by a multitude of issues, leading to Amazon ceasing its production in 2015. With today marking the tenth anniversary of the Fire Phone, it’s time to recount the chain of events that caused the device to crash and burn a year after its release.

The Fire Phone had a lot of expectations riding on its shoulders

Though things never worked out in its favor

The original Amazon Fire tablet was designed to rival the iPad, and following its huge success, the e-commerce giant decided to double down on mobile devices. The phone was eventually released on July 25, 2014, after Amazon had fine-tuned it for years to match Apple’s iPhone. Even before its release, the Fire Phone was already a hot topic among mobile enthusiasts, and when Jeff Bezos officially announced the device at an event in Seattle, the interest in the device skyrocketed.

Although many of the additions that Bezos planned for the Fire Phone were scrapped by the time it was unveiled, the device packed a ton of features that set it apart from the Apple and Android market. Designed to complement the Amazon ecosystem, the Fire Phone had numerous functionalities that leveraged the company’s robust services. The Amazon Cloud Drive provided unlimited cloud storage, while the Firefly app could scan objects in real-time and display their respective listings on Amazon.

That’s before you include the four front-facing cameras that could track the user’s head and modify the UI on the fly to deliver better depth, resulting in an almost 3D experience. So, why did the device fail despite its myriad of features? Well, as it turned out, the Fire Phone’s flaws outnumbered its pros.

Its lackluster app catalog couldn’t justify the steep price

And many features were nothing more than party tricks

Besides being almost four years late to the smartphone market, Amazon’s Fire Phone was a poorly executed device that lacked many facilities that users wanted in a smartphone. Its price didn’t help much either. The base model came with 32GB of storage and was priced at $199, with the 64GB variant charging an additional $100, assuming you signed a two-year contract with AT&T.

While that may not sound like a big deal in 2024 when the best smartphones cost well over $1000, the Fire Phone costs as much as the flagship devices of yore. The off-contract price was also a staggering $650, and the sky-high rates made the software issues even more noticeable.

For starters, the Fire Phone supported the highly lacking Amazon Appstore, and you had to jump through several hoops to sideload Google’s Play Store. Even in 2024, Amazon’s application marketplace can’t hold a candle to Play Store, and the gap between the two was even wider back in 2014. Plus, it lacked support for other software in Google’s app suite, making the proprietary FireOS useless for anyone switching from Android.

Finally, the 3D stereoscopic display served as a cool gimmick that everybody forgot after a while. The smartphone community also realized the Fire Phone’s other feature, Firefly, was just a convenient excuse for Amazon to sell more products to its user base.

It flopped so hard that Amazon discounted it to $0.99

And even then, nobody wanted to buy it

Soon after its release, it became clear that Amazon’s magnum opus had failed to set the world on fire. So, after six weeks of inadequate sales and terrible reviews, Amazon cut the price of the Fire Phone and its two-year AT&T contract to 99 cents. If that sounds familiar, then HTC tried a similar approach for its failed Facebook Phone, which was launched a little over a year before the Fire Phone.

Sadly, the Fire Phone had the same result as its useless comrade-in-arms, and by November, the cost of the unlocked version of the Fire Phone dropped to $179. That was quite a fall in price for a device that retailed for $650 at the time of its release. Within the next year, the device had fallen to $130, and by late August 2015, it was nowhere to be seen on the Amazon storefront.

Amazon Fire Phone: A decent smartphone that kicked the bucket after just one generation

Despite going up in smoke, the Amazon Fire Phone definitely held a lot of promise. The Snapdragon 800 processor was quite decent for a smartphone from 2014, and so were the HD display and all-glass body. But all of its positive attributes were overridden by the limited app support. Its pioneering feature of directing users to the Amazon website upon scanning a product didn’t help much either, as everybody realized the Firefly facility was meant to benefit the company more than the users.

Following the massive failure of the Fire Phone, Amazon diverted its attention to other devices. Today, the Fire Phone is nothing more than a skeleton in the tech graveyard. With Amazon making zero attempts to revive it, we probably won’t see the device rising from its ashes like a phoenix anytime soon.