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Amazon removes Mayday customer support service from its devices
- Amazon announced it will discontinue its Mayday service sometime this month.
- Customers can still use Mayday’s screen-sharing feature for customer support.
- Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled Mayday in September 2013 alongside the Kindle HDX tablets.
A staple feature of Amazon tablets since 2013, Mayday will soon head toward its grave as GeekWire noticed that Mayday’s support page now contains a June 2018 expiration date.
According to Amazon, it discontinued Mayday because the service’s video calling feature was offered on legacy devices that the online retailer no longer sells. The service will not completely disappear, however, as the screen-sharing feature will stick around. To enable the feature, you can either tap the Phone & Email icon or open the Help app.
Alternatively, customers can reach customer service through email, phone, or chat.
Introduced by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos during a September 2013 briefing with reporters, Mayday allowed customers to have a virtual face-to-face chat with a customer representative. Bezos touted the service as the result of Amazon’s integration of hardware, software, and the cloud.
Amazon has since heavily invested in its Alexa voice assistant, which can provide basic tech support and requires no pay. It could also be that Mayday was a money pit for Amazon, which previously struggled with negative operating income.
Whatever the reason, Amazon’s low-cost Fire tablets helped the company capture almost 11 percent of the tablet market space. Mayday likely played a part in that increasing market share, seeing how Amazon prominently included the feature in commercials and sought to decrease response times as much as possible.