As the online storage wars heat up, Amazon said today it was opening up Cloud Drive to third-party developers as a way to stand out from the competition.
Cloud Drive is Amazon’s consumer-facing service, which gives its customers 5GB of free storage to keep personal photos, videos and files. The concept is similar to Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive and other online storage companies, which give away some capacity for free, in hopes of locking in a customer for life.
Both Microsoft and Google offer 15GB of storage for free, so by opening up Cloud Drive to developers, Amazon may be hoping to attract customers in other ways, like knowing that it will be convenient to print, edit or manage content inside other apps.
Likewise, developers may find integrating with Cloud Drive compelling because it allows them to focus more on their own app rather than figuring out storage. But in most cases, these apps will have to integrate with multiple storage providers to appeal to a broad set of customers.
A few apps launched Cloud Drive integration today, with the main categories are productivity, utility and consumer. Here is an example of each:
- OfficeSuite, which is coming soon to Cloud Drive, allows you to create, edit and share Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint files that you have stored on the Cloud Drive.
- FreePrints allows you to order free 4×6-inch prints of your photos in Cloud Drive (up to 1,000 a year). Shipping not included. There’s fees for other sized photos, as well.
- FileThis helps you organize your documents, such as bills and documents from bank accounts, credit cards or insurance companies without having to log-in to each vendor’s site repeatedly. The documents are then searchable.
Not surprisingly, 
Amazon said an unspecified “millions” use Cloud Drive to access their digital content from TVs, computers, tablets and phones. Amazon offers Fire phone owners, and as of more recently, Amazon Prime members, unlimited photo storage at no cost.
In a blog post aimed at developers, Amazon’s Peter Heinrich wrote: “Now you can build on that functionality and connect users to their Cloud Drive content from within your own apps. Enhance your photo editing app, for example, by allowing users to browse photos they have already stored in the cloud.”
Here are the documents developers will need to add Cloud Drive to their web, desktop or mobile apps.
