Amazon’s Android app now supports Lollipop, Android Wear

Amazon may be busy developing its own version of Android for its Fire tablets, phones, and TV boxes. But the company wants you to use its apps and services whether you’ve got Amazon hardware or not — which is why it seemed a little strange that the Amazon Mobile app for Android didn’t yet support Android 5.0 when I published my review of the Google Nexus 6 last week.

Now Amazon has updated its mobile app to support Android 5.0. And the company has also added support for Android Wear.

That means you can now use an Android Wear smartwatch to search for items on Amazon using your voice, buy items, or save items to your wish list.

All you need to do is say “Start Amazon” to your watch to start using the new app.

As for the phone/tablet app, you can use it to shop, stream video from Amazon Instant Video, view your wishlist or watchlist, and even download Android apps from the Amazon Appstore.

One thing you still can’t do is stream Amazon videos to a Chromecast. You can try mirroring your display to a Chromecast while watching content from Amazon, but the quality isn’t great when you do that, and you’ll run down the battery on your phone more quickly than you would if you could just beam videos straight to a Chromecast.

Now that Amazon’s $39 Fire TV Stick is about to start shippping, it’s not clear if Amazon has any incentive to add support for Google’s Chromecast in the near future.