Amazon has tried to take on Apple’s App Store with their own Android Appstore, though not all developers are happy over the decisions they’ve made. Appstore director Aaron Rubenson recently defended the service s policies in a VentureBeat interview.
We certainly recognize that it s a different model,” said Rubenson. “The reason we made that decision was that it gives us the broadest amount of flexibility in terms of marketing and merchandising and proactive promotional activities we were talking about, which we think is a real value for the customers.”
Some developers have been critical of some of Amazon’s pricing decision and other similar unilateral moves. “We decided that it was the one that made the most sense for us so that we could do the best job of marketing developers products effectively. I think if you look at the site today, what you find is that the vast majority of the products are simply priced at list price,” said Rubenson. “When developers are trying to get their product discovered, the promotion as a free app of the day is a very powerful marketing vehicle. Then once that core base of customers has a product installed, they tell their friends about it. That spurs more downloads. It rises in popularity in our store. That makes it more popular as people are scrolling through the bestseller list and notice it there, he explained. So it starts the virtuous cycle from a marketing perspective. And then increasingly as developers are using various forms of monetization post-purchase, such as advertising or in-app purchasing technology, there are all sorts of downstream monetization opportunities as well once you have that initial base.”
ShiftyJelly, developer of the Pocket Casts app, contends that Amazon re-wrote the description of their app with erroneous information, set their app price without any input from the developer, and has poor real-time information gathering compared to the Android Market.
Amazon s biggest feature by far, has been their Free App Of The Day promotion. Publicly their terms say that they pay developers 20 percent of the asking price of an app, even when they give it away free. To both consumers and naive developers alike, this seems like a big chance to make something rare in the Android world: real money. But here s the dirty secret Amazon don t want you to know, they don t pay developers a single cent, wrote the developer. That s right, Amazon gave away 101,491 copies of our app! At this point, we had a few seconds of excitement as well, had we mis-read the email and really earned $54,800 in one day We would have done if our public agreement was in place, but we can now confirm that thanks to Amazon s secret back-door deals, we made $0 on that day.
Did the exposure count for much in the days afterwards That s also a big no, the day after saw a blip in sales, followed by things going back to exactly where we started, selling a few apps a day. In fact Amazon decided to rub salt in the wounds a little further by discounting our app to 99 cents for a few days after the free promotion.
