

Amazon App Store: Rotten To The Core - neckbeard
http://shiftyjelly.wordpress.com/2011/08/02/amazon-app-store-rotten-to-the-core/

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hullo
He knew it was a bad deal, and that it didn't seem to work with their business
model, but he did it any way (as pressured by other people in the company,
which he admits). There's absolutely no surprises for them in this post, just
regret. Sure, they didn't "realize" that it would garner so many free
downloads, but that was always a chance, and in any case could have been
quickly determined before agreeing by contacting other developers of featured
apps.

The one piece of legitimate news here is that app of the day developers aren't
being compensated at all, but that comes no where near justifying "rotten to
the core", especially as they're all well aware of the terms when they agree
to them.

He seems overly concerned with people who download the app just because they
think it will trigger some micropayment to the developer, but that can't be a
large number of people (developers paying attention to the launch terms of the
market) and in any case are very unlikely to make up much of his support
burden.

~~~
ericb
I'm not sure that they knew it was a bad deal.

In the Apple store, if you got that many downloads and that kind of placement,
the traffic from the various lists and high placement for 7 days would convert
to many many paid sales over the following days.

~~~
shiftyjelly
We suspected it was a bad deal, but tried it anyway as an experiment. Our blog
post wanted to point that out, but more so we took issue with the fact that
most people think Amazon pays 20% of the asking price even when an app is
given away. Their agreement with devs says as much. No one seems to know that
to be featured you have to agree to 0%. Again we agreed, but the secrecy is
where our beef lies, we wanted to make that public.

~~~
GHFigs
I agree strongly that Amazon needs to make this clearer in their emails an
admin pages (listing earnings that don't exist is _terrible_ ) but as far as
their agreement goes, I think you are mistaken.

Section 2.a. of the Amazon Appstore agreement, emphasis mine:

"a. Royalty. For each sale of an App, we will pay you a royalty (“Royalty”)
equal to the greater of (i) 70% of the purchase price or (ii) 20% of the List
Price (defined in and subject to section 5i) as of the purchase date. _No
Royalty is payable for Apps with a List Price of $0.00._ Such purchase price
excludes taxes and any separately stated fees or charges. _A Royalty is due
only for sales for which we have received final payment from or on behalf of
an end user._ If an App is purchased using a credit card or bank account
deduction mechanism, final payment will be deemed to have occurred when the
applicable credit card company or bank has fully settled the payment for the
applicable purchase."

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danielhunt
That's absolutely incredible. It's also the first I'd heard about difficulties
with the Amazon App Store (which, if I remember correctly, was opened to great
fanfare about how developer & user friendly it was)

It does seem as though Android is an _incredibly_ difficult platform to make
money on though. This site has been littered with complaints (& plenty of iOS-
vs-Android posts) about the dev process and lack of buyer activity.

I've actually found myself buying more than I otherwise would have, as a
result of this sentiment. I want to support Android dev, and my credit card
seems like the most logical way to do that.

Funnily enough, I've never even considered the Amazon market. I wonder what
type of people do...

~~~
glimcat
A large part of the problem is the "race to the bottom" mentality. Users have
been taught (by Apple) that software is $0.99 - if not free. You have to get
massive user numbers before that becomes profitable, or find another way out
of the trap.

Google's Market is pretty good, and there's always the option of self-
distributing (Swype does this and it is still very popular).

I wouldn't use Amazon's App Store after reading things like this. It's less
usable for customers and it takes a lot out of the developer's control.
However, I've seen developers handling this very badly. For example, they get
shocked by the way the Free App promotion works (starting with the fact that
it's FREE) and then try to remove the app from the store and deny those
customers all further access to updates and the ability to reinstall (which
may be wanted reasonably often if you use custom firmware). I don't care if
you sold it for $0 or if you got burned by Amazon, that's still a bit of a
bait-and-switch.

~~~
danielhunt
The 'race to the bottom' on pricing diesn't seem to have hit the Android
market in the same way as the iOS app store, from what I've seen.

I've not had any difficulty justifying paying more for an app/game, thanks
mainly to the 15 minute refund window.

Bad handling on the developer's part is a valid complaint alright. I'm sure
it's frustrating and painful to have to support potentially large numbers of
users (note: not customers) for no gain whatsoever. That, along with the
obviously lacking editorial control to respond to troubled users is a glaring
red flag to steer clear of the system.

~~~
glimcat
Users, customers - if you do a free promotion, you're doing a business
transaction with them. It's not like they went and hunted up a rogue APK.

15 minute refund is usually good enough to run the "does this work on my
device" check, although it doesn't always cut it if there are network issues
or if something crashes or what have you. I'd be more comfortable buying more
casually if it was longer, but it's much better than not having it. (Another
reason not to buy from Amazon.)

~~~
danielhunt
Users/Customers: I agree that they're the same thing in this case. I just
don't like how the enormous volume of the free users, compared to the tiny
number of paid ones, has resulted in them having to up their actual hardware
costs just to support the system as a result of this :(

~~~
glimcat
Yeah. It's often a poor value proposition and can cause a lot of negative
fallout if you aren't prepared for and planning to exploit the numbers it
generates (see also: Groupon).

It would be very interesting to see what big-ticket participants thought of
the process (e.g. Angry Birds, Plants vs. Zombies).

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Yhippa
I imagine if Amazon had to reimburse developers for any non-zero amount this
would be bad for business. It sounds like they're in this "free app a day"
thing for the long-haul.

It also seems to me that what the developer is getting for this is a free day
of advertising. So if someone tries your app who normally wouldn't have
because it's prominently displayed on the top of the screen and they like it
they might buy the next version or other apps from you.

