It's been nearly a year and a half since we last wrote about the Amazon MP3 app, because that's the last time the company did anything interesting with it. Compared to the competition at Google and elsewhere, Amazon's iTunes competitor looks positively stale. Today the Amazon MP3 app gets a fresh coat of paint to bring it more in line with current visual trends, or at least, those trends that are on display in the Kindle Fire tablets.

Below: Old and busted. Above: new hotness.

I wouldn't say that the adjusted UI is great, but it's clean and functional, which should suit music fans just fine. The app is still split into music stored on Amazon's cloud service and locally on your device, with the same basic tabbed interface that lets you swipe across playlists, artists, albums, songs, et cetera. With the new simplified UI the tabs are really just highlighted words with the same gray-white-orange palette on display in most of Amazon's first-party Kindle Fire apps. The new integration with the MP3 store looks nice.

Amazon claims that the app is now "lightning fast," and indeed, it does feel considerably more snappy than the last time I tried it. You can also share your listening habits on Facebook, something that the Google Play Music app recently acquired. Amazon's music store and cloud player is still a tough sell if you're invested in Google Play, or indeed, any other music service, but if you've been using Amazon MP3 since the beginning your Android experience should now be markedly improved.

[EMBED_APP]https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.amazon.mp3[/EMBED_APP]