It featured full structured code and numerous high-level functions for loading and manipulating images, animations, and sounds.
These capabilities made it a popular choice among Amiga enthusiasts, particularly beginners, for creating video games (especially platformers and graphical adventures), multimedia applications, and educational software.
AMAL scripts in effect created CopperLists, small routines executed by the Amiga's Agnus chip.
One of AMOS BASIC's disadvantages, stemming from its Atari ST lineage, was its incompatibility with the Amiga's operating system functions and interfaces.
The source code to AMOS was released around 2001 under a BSD style license by Clickteam, a company that includes the original programmer.