I'm looking around and contacting 3rd party software makers to find out if they intend to support uploading and downloading from Amazon new service like they do for Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. The only thing I can say about Amazon's rollout of their new, consumer-geared unlimited storage is that it is a potentially incredible thing that is throttled and ruined by it's awful software.
Its getting to the point that Im reluctant to go to Amazon. It happens regularly and I dont experience it on other sites. (Firefox, Fedora22, Thinkpad T440s with 8GB RAM and large SSD drive). Shame on me, but I mistakenly thought that by sending all my thousands of photos, videos, documents, etc from my private archives would mean they'd be as easy to access as they were from Dropbox or my iMac, but truthfully, they might as well be on the moon. One tab with an Amazon product list and a few more tabs containing products will basically freeze my browser for multiple tens of seconds.
There doesn't appear to be any simple way to have it monitor the folder(s) of my choice and update them in the background. Like others have noted, it is slow - very, very slow. I'm excited about the unlimited storage for $60/year, but being forced to use this app to take advantage of it is painful. Otherwise, just use the Amazon Cloud Drive web site-there's nothing you can do with the app that you can't do with the site, and lots you can do with the site that you can't with the app. If you have the earlier app, I recommend you continue using it until an OS update permanently breaks it (assuming you are satisfied with the service and will continue using it). Even if you are someone who finds Amazon's new Cloud Drive pricing scheme suitable and appropriate (and I am not such a person), there is no value to be had in installing and using this app. Note that this is not a review of the Cloud Drive service itself that has its own set of issues. The current app is little more than an interface to the Cloud Drive web site-with fewer features and capabilities than the web page itself.
That app has not been distributed or supported by Amazon for over a year. The desktop app lets you control how much bandwidth is used when syncing files, and you can set the app to automatically sync and update specific folders. The old app was a menu bar app that allowed automatic synchronization of a folder to your Cloud Drive, as Dropbox does. Enter the password and click on the 'Login' button. To do this, type in the phone number or mailbox address into the field.
The Amazon Photos app on Google Play at the time of this writing had. Now, it remains a couple of steps to install and configure Google Drive. The distinction is subtle, but significant. Amazon Photos is a cloud-based photo storage option offered as part of the Amazon. This is not the same app as the old "Amazon Cloud Drive.app".