Google Play / entertainment / PRIME VIDEO
REVIEW
Prime Video on Android is the streaming app users tolerate for the catalogue.
Bundled with Prime, padded with ads by default since the 2024 rollout, and home to Thursday Night Football and the most expensive originals on television. The 4.14 rating tells you exactly how that landed.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 4 MIN READ
Prime Video
AMAZON MOBILE LLC
OUR SCORE
6.8
GOOGLE PLAY
★ 4.1
PRICE
Free
In-app purchases
Prime Video on Android is the app you keep installed because the catalogue earned it, not because the experience deserves it. Reacher, The Boys, Fallout, Rings of Power, Thursday Night Football — the slate is genuinely competitive with anything Netflix or HBO ships, and X-Ray is still the best in-frame metadata overlay on any streaming service. None of that is in dispute. The 4.14 rating on Google Play is.
The rating reflects what happened in January 2024. Amazon flipped every Prime membership into an ad-supported tier by default, then offered the previous ad-free experience as a monthly upcharge on top of a subscription most members had bought primarily for free shipping. Subscribers who had been paying for years discovered mid-roll ads on content they had already finished, with a paywall as the only way back. The recent Play Store reviews are dominated by that exact grievance, and the math doesn’t really argue.
The app underneath all of this is fine. Casting works most of the time, downloads are reliable, the storefront is messier than it should be but no worse than it was three years ago. What changed wasn’t the engineering — it was the deal. Prime Video is now a worse value than it was, and a sufficiently large number of users noticed all at once for the rating to record it. The catalogue is still the catalogue. The relationship is what soured.
Amazon spent a billion dollars on Rings of Power and then made you pay extra to watch it without ads. The user reviews are the receipt.
FEATURES
Prime Video on Android is the streaming client bundled with an Amazon Prime membership. The app handles on-demand films and series, live sports (Thursday Night Football in the US, Premier League fixtures in the UK, ATP and WTA tennis, NBA games under the recent rights deal), Amazon's slate of originals (The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Reacher, Citadel, The Boys, Fallout, Mr. & Mrs. Smith), and a rentals / purchases storefront for titles outside the subscription catalogue. A separate Channels marketplace bolts on subscriptions to third-party services (Paramount+, MGM+, BritBox) billed through Amazon.
The app supports Chromecast and Google TV handoff, downloads for offline viewing on supported titles, X-Ray (the IMDb overlay that identifies actors and trivia in the current scene — still the best implementation of its kind on any service), profiles, parental controls, and multi-language audio / subtitle tracks. Playback tops out at 4K HDR with Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos on phones and tablets that support them.
In January 2024 Amazon flipped the default tier to include ads. Subscribers who want the previous ad-free experience pay a monthly upcharge on top of Prime in every market where the change rolled out.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The catalogue is the reason this app stays on phones. Reacher, The Boys, Fallout, and Rings of Power are tentpole originals that genuinely compete with HBO and Netflix's top tier, and the Thursday Night Football package made Prime Video the only place to watch one-seventh of the NFL regular season. X-Ray remains a quiet pleasure — pause any frame and the actor names appear inline, no separate app required.
Download support is broad and reliable. Long-haul travellers get most of the catalogue available offline at watchable bitrates, with smart-download queue management that handles serial TV well. The Chromecast handoff is fast and the app remembers where you left off across devices without the hand-wringing some competitors require.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The ad-tier-by-default rollout is the single biggest reason this app sits at 4.14 instead of the high fours. Subscribers who had paid for Prime for years woke up to mid-roll ads on content they had already watched ad-free, with the only opt-out being an additional monthly fee on top of a membership most people bought primarily for free shipping. The recent Play Store reviews are dominated by exactly this complaint, and they are not wrong to be there.
The Android app itself has long-running rough edges that the ad rollout amplified. Casting occasionally fails silently and requires a force-quit to recover. The "Continue Watching" row regularly forgets where you left off across reboots. Search prioritises rentable titles over titles included in the subscription, which feels like a storefront problem rather than a viewer problem. And the storefront / subscription split — some titles in your library, some titles to rent, some titles only on a Channels add-on — is harder to parse on a phone than it should be in 2026.
CONCLUSION
Keep Prime Video installed if you have the membership and watch the originals; the catalogue genuinely justifies the slot. Pay the ad-free upcharge only if mid-roll interruptions on content you already own actively ruin your evening. Watch for whether Amazon ever rebuilds the storefront UX to honestly distinguish what you can watch from what you can rent — that single fix would pull this score back up.