HIGH FIDELITY

Amazon’s iPhone app used to be just a better version of their mobile browser experience. But with one update, they increased the value of this app enormously.

The barcode scanner makes the Amazon app pretty much the best thing you can have with you while shopping in a physical store. Imagine you’re in Best Buy looking at a 46″ Samsung TV – is it cheaper on Amazon, you wonder? Twenty seconds later, you have your answer (it wasn’t).

This is not a brand new update to their app (October last year), but it shows how good digital products tend to be highly iterative, with small updates sometimes driving huge increases in utility value. The lesson is that almost no one gets it exactly right the very first time.