AMOS competed on the Amiga platform with Acid Software's Blitz BASIC. Both BASICs differed from other dialects on different platforms, in that they allowed the easy creation of fairly demanding multimedia software, with full structured code and many high-level functions to load images, animations, sounds and display them in various ways.
The original AMOS version was interpreter (computer software)-based, which worked fine but suffered from performance problems. Later, an AMOS compiler was developed, that fixed most of the problems (but not all).
AMOS was mostly used to make video games (platformers and graphical adventures) and educational software.
The language was mildly successful within the Amiga community. Its ease of use made it especially attractive to beginners. Blitz BASIC was anyway widely regarded as superior.
As of 2003, the language is dead together with the machine it was running on, and only a small community of enthusiasts is using it. However DarkBasic, from Dark Basic Software limited, bears a considerable resemblance to Amos.