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Amazon App Store 'Rotten To the Core,' Says Dev
suraj.sun sends an excerpt from this post made by a developer who decided to try out Amazon's App Store, only to be disappointed with the experience:
"Amazon's biggest feature by far, has been their Free App Of The Day promotion. Publicly their terms say that they pay developers 20% 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. ... Amazon is being predatory here, and asking developers (who are often desperate for exposure) to give away their app, in order to promote Amazon. In the end we agreed that we had entered the world of Android development as an experiment, and it would seem silly not to add more data to the experiment we were conducting. The day of our promotion came: ... 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. That's right, over 100,000 apps given away, $0 made."
It seems like the developer received the terms of the deal, and then promptly ignored them because of the imaginary dollar signs in their eyes.
bitter much?
Business As Usual
I use Gentoo; how does this affect me?
Sounds like someone didn't have a lawyer.
20% of 0 = 0
love is just extroverted narcissism
Moral of the story - read the contract?
And, good luck with that.
Steve Jobs, Steve Ballmer, Larry Elison and Jeff Bezos all took turns at sucking the penguin cock, Gnu/Semen was everywhere, but their was no vaginas around for miles.
The old version of Amazon's agreement stated that developers would receive 20% of the original price when an app was given away for free. Then they changed it, and they didn't make it clear to developers. For many of them it was a nasty surprise. Unfortunately I can't find the original, but the new version is here https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/mobile-apps/devportal/pdf/Appstore_Distribution_Agreement.pdf with the added sentence "No Royalty is payable for Apps with a List Price of $0.00." in Section 2(a).
100,000 apps were given away to people who would have ignored your app and gone for someone else's free app if yours wasn't free.
If your app is worth anything, you just earned more than 100k word of mouth sales at ${full_price}.
Once again, Apple's app store remains the only place to actually make any money and get a fair deal. The Android fanboys are already making smart remarks to defend their platform, but it doesn't change the fact that this is yet another mark on the face of Android development, on top of so many things.
Amazon told them in advance that they would get 0% of revenue (which would be $0, anyway). Amazon repeated this when they asked for confirmation. They recieved $0.
The only problem is an apparent error in the reporting which stated $54,800 in revenue on $0 of sales. But that is the only contradiction here.
Is this a good deal for developers? I don't know. Is Amazon screwing developers out of promised revenue with "secret back-door deals"? I see no evidence here.
Amazon's deceptive business practices have been noted for future reference.
- AC & Android Developer
Amazon used intentionally misleading and vague wording. They did not state definitively whether or not the devs would receive 20% of the earnings, but I can see where there was confusion. It's always good, especially when dealing with businesses, to err on the side of caution, due to situations such as these.
The summary implies that the developers didn't know that they would get no money. The article makes it clear that they not only were told they would get nothing, but they confirmed in subsequent emails with Amazon that they would get nothing. Knowing this, they still decided to go ahead with the deal.
The Amazon emails have a good point:
The Free App of the Day promotion is the most valuable and visible spot in the store. It hosted the launch of the likes of Angry Birds Rio, Plants v. Zombies and more. Amazon will not receive any sales rev share from the Free App of the Day; and in fact, with as the Free of the Day for one day, you will receive a subsequent Appstore main page placement for the following 14 days. All these highly valuable placements are at no cost to you. We want to promote your app and in exchange of the placements, at the 0% rev share for one day only.
Being "Free app of the day" is a huge advert for your app - and adverts have a cost. Being app of the day is optional - not mandatory - the developers in question could have said no. And the cost is not 101,491 copies of your app - that's RIAA accounting. The majority of downloaders will try your app once and then never use it again. Some may continue to use it, and when they do, if you're smart you'll figure out a way to monetise their usage (e.g. charge for version 2, offer premium feature updates etc.).
thanks to Amazon's secret back-door deals, we made $0 on that day.
Amazon also made $0 that day (from your app). You agreed to the deal. It gave your app enormous exposure. You didn't lose 101,491 sales, because the vast majority of those people would never have bought your app anyway.
Amateur developers are funny. Is this some kid in college developing for Android? You probably don't deserve to get paid anyway.
Read your contracts morons and then recheck the terms every once in a while.
Or better yet, don't sign deals with the devil in the first place.
Loving it! Maybe you fucks will give up on that shit and develop apps for a real smart phone.
Amazon, google, apple, microsoft and all the other big players control the market for apps. This is a very bad position for individual developers because it means that to get a foothold in the market, they need to be a part of one of them.
Is the moral of the story to read the contract, No. The moral is to stop feeding these companies and stop them from being able to command the market.
I really hope tech people realise this soon else we can safely say that we asked for this state of affairs to come about.
Please please please, stop giving your hard work away to these monsters just so they can grow bigger. Seriously, what else do they do apart from get bigger? It is us as individuals that do all the innovating, not them, they just pick up our innovations and run away with them. They are leaches!
How about we start distributing our hard work ourselves?
It's software. It cost nothing to duplicate. You get exposure.
Quit whining.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
When people get things for free take an X amount, it does not mean X people would have paid for your app if it was not free. This developer did not lose 50000 dollar in revenue. More likely they lost like 100 dollar, tops.
I don't even know the average size of the typical android app, but I'm guessing a 1000 LOC app would be HUGE in comparison to most of them, yet they want actual valuta for what is essentially an afternoon's work? I've seen a "must-have" app a friend showed me once, it was a GUI frontend to pgrep/pkill, for $5. The ripoff here is they charge you $$ for what is essentially a "hello world" app, then one day Google has the infernal gall to actually give it to you for free, and the devs whinge. Here's a surefire way to not get ripped off when Google puts your app up on "free day", opt out of the darn thing. I'm sure there's some way or another you can tell Google that you don't wish to have your app given away that they'll honor, or at least indemnify you for lost revenue when they DO put it up for free.Short of that, you can always go back to windows developing, and stay off free platforms until you realize that the crap you puked out on your keyboard in an afternoon isn't worth $50 a pop.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
They present one deal publicly, then renegotiate every Free App of the Day deal depending on whether or not they feel that the it is to Amazon's advantage. The Angry Birds get paid, the small local guy does not. This is predatory, though not illegal, and shows that they fundamentally misunderstand the ecosystem they need to foster in order for them to do well. If they were the only game in town, this might work for them, but they are not.
I have only anecdotal evidence, but it seems to me that the Amazon Store is used to grab free apps and nothing else. It's not compelling for users or developers.
I see people posting about "free exposure" and that sort of thing. But this is only getting exposure for Amazon, who presumably wants to build a user- and application-base for their own upcoming Google-free Android devices.
See, advertising is about drawing attention and profiting when people purchase your product. Regular advertisements do this. Even sales do this. But giving your stuff away doesn't make you money. Any exposure you got was immediately lost to those exposed who either wanted your product or didn't even want it for nothing. Anyone who didn't see it wasn't exposed, and therefore doesn't matter, or worse, will pass on your app even on sale to just wait for the next "free" one. Why pay anything?
However having free stuff does net Amazon a lot of exposure and incentive for new customers. This will sell their devices and platform through exposure.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Like countless other foreigners, my Amazon appstore account has a fake name, fake US address, and fake US credit-card number.
Using it to get a paid app might be crossing a line, even if it worked.
The article makes it perfectly clear that you knew you wouldn't get any money, and still chose to give your app away for free, in exchange for the exposure. So what exactly are you whining about?
Every Amazon purchased app will try to contact the Amazon Appstore when it is launched.
The Appstore itself will try to phone home at least a few times a day even if the Amazon purchased apps are not running.
Some Amazon purchased apps will not launch if you uninstall the Appstore.
http://www.the-digital-reader.com/2011/04/12/apps-from-amazon-routinely-phone-home-and-other-interesting-details/
The current price of this placement is at 0% rev share for that one day you are placed.
The emphasis there was actually added by them in their email. So we asked them to confirm, what seemed a ridiculous proposition:
They even added the emphasis in the email, how much more clear could it be that you weren't going to get paid for apps given away that day?!?! I mean, cmon, do you expect amazon to start paying 50k a day from no revenue to the app developers from your free app? What were you expecting exactly? I'll attempt a music analogy with the RIAA and a band here (I know how much the crowd here hates the *IAA but whatever). You're in some band that nobody really knows. You sell a few tunes on iTunes here and there, barely a dozen a day, certainly not enough to finance yourself. Then along comes the RIAA and tells you they like your tune, and they'd like to promote it. They're going to promote it and let people download it free for a day. Of course you say yes because you want the publicity and go along. You realize 100,000 people have heard your song by the next day and you're thrilled to have such a great fan base now!! And maybe you didn't make any money that day, but hey you've got a name for yourself and the sky's the limit now!!
Oh wait.. is that not how it went? Oh yea. I forgot that if this was reality, you'd never actually make any money on any of your songs due to your shady record contract. You can still collect on all future sales of your app. Also, from TFA
"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."
Maybe your app wasn't as popular as you hoped it would be, hence the low number of buyers afterwards? Maybe you're just a little bitter having to come to terms with that and you're taking it out on amazon? So tell me, instead of your free publicity, would you rather have not gone through with this at all, and kept up with the single or double digit daily sales?
The difference between free and 0.01 is infinite. The sort of people who will come to the trough for a free download are not the sort who will pay money, unless there's something very, very special about the app.
In fact, giving it away (even for a day) can be harmful. It tells the people who did pay for it that they've been suckered. They are now lost customers if there's ever an updated version. They won't pay for that, they'll remember how they got shafted the first time and wait until it gets given away. Same with all the people who got it for free - the author has now defined the base price (i.e. 0.00) and people out there will not feel inclined to pay more than that for it.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Its a little disapointing they only printed stats for a few days before of sales and stopped at that they should have posted the after stats so we could see if the exposure they got was worth it as amazon tried to say it would be.
Android users are basically unemployed pony-tailed degenerates who've made a series of bad decisions in their lives, thus ending up with an Android phone. Undoubtedly these users would end up stealing Android software through "jailbreaking" methods, so the developers in this story would have ended up with $0 anyways.
They got on the plane, they knew what they were getting into.
I say, let 'em crash." -- Airplane
Get over it. You knew who you were getting into bed with. You signed up. Nobody put a gun to your head.
You imply that you expected to get paid, but the mail to and from Amazon very obviously states you will get nothing for the free downloads. You are bashing them for a "secret backdoor deal," but it was a deal that you WILLINGLY went along with. You clearly state that you knew you would get ZERO revenue for the exposure of being the App of the Day. Amazon even refers to the lack of revenue as "the current price of this placement." How did they mislead you?
You talk about Amazon being "predatory" in their dealings with you. What was the effect of saying "No thanks?" Did they threaten to remove your app from the store or relegate it to a place no one would have been able to find it? It doesn't sound like it.
I'm not going to say that you should have realized the strain of the extra downloads affecting your servers, but it doesn't seem too difficult to predict. Thus, you should have weighed the cost of that work/equipment against the additional exposure.
Finally, you complained that the word of mouth advertising didn't do much for your sales. However, you now have 100K people who know the name of your company and the quality of your products - that's the effect that you should have been counting on for helping your follow-up products.
You made a bad business deal that you now regret. Grow up, stop complaining about it, and make another app that hopefully benefits from all the people who now know your name. And next time
they all took turn sodomizing the penguin before going home to fuck their trophy wives and mistresses. the penguin is left with a wounded self esteem and sore ass.
moral of the story - don't trust proprietary software vendors; they'll rip you off and leave you with a sore ass.
There are over 100,000 people using Amazon's app store!? That *is* shocking!
when someone wants to give away your app and pay you nothing, say no.
Don't whine about it. I mean, you knew you where going to give it away, so don' complain about the added hardware costs.
Clearly they're upset to learn that there app is just useful enough to be worth 0 dollars to most people, but worth the time to down load.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Amazon clearly is doing some underhanded thing with their appstore, and I've heard other reports about how bad it is as well.
However, just like in piracy cases, you'll have to watch out how many copies you count toward sales - many of the users that tried your app probably wouldn't have bought it in the first place, and simply wanted to try it (much like movies and music being available on Pirate Bay). Not every copy would have been a legitimate sale. You're definitely not short a full $54,000.
But...Amazon shouldn't be allowed to change your royalties 1 cent without permission. Actually, I'm quite bothered that they even asked you to forgo your royalties for that one day, especially after having advertised that you would receive 20% of the original price. As you said, this is only giving Amazon exposure, not your app. And it's certainly not supporting you. I'm still debating if that's just outright corporate stupidity or well-disguised greed. It's bad enough that you're only getting 20% of the royalties in the first place - you should be getting 50-80%!
OK, you got a glass of unsweetened lemon juice. Here is how you put some sugar and water in to make it taste better:
Time to come out with a pay-only upgrade. You have 100,000 users. If you charge just $1, you have a chunk coming your way, depending on how many upgrade.
Done in one.
Oh, and this is why apps should always have a way for the developer to message the user with a link. This way if you get sick of the market that distributes your app, you can tell you users to "Get super awesome app 2 here (links to app store that isn't the one you are mad at)."
Finally, you can use the same in app message feature to tell your users about your other apps.
Or you can go sulk about your 100,000 user new customer base. It's up to you.
-- $G
Not only is the support for developers the worse I have ever seen, they are continually changing the rules on how they want things. I have pulled my apps from Amazon and won't go back. The same app was submitted with a new enhancement, but yet they wanted to me change the way the internal passwords were displayed for the users. This part wasn't changed at all from the previous version! I don't know why they think they need to control the apps! It seems to take at least one week to get an update "approved". I changed the price of my app a couple of months ago and then at the end of the month they said they had $0 for me. They said the price change didn't take effect. The customers told me they paid for the app. I complained but they said tough luck. I could probably write a short book on this subject, but have wasted so much money and time with Amazon that I just give up.
Back in April the International Game Developers Association released an advisory to members detailing how onerous the terms and conditions of this app store are. http://igdaboard.wordpress.com/2011/04/14/important-advisory-about-amazon%E2%80%99s-appstore-distribution-terms-2/ .
Guess they should have hired a lawyer for $200 to look over the contract. Lesson learned I would hope.
I think the main point of the developer is to clear up a misconception about Amazon's app store (which I also had until I saw this story). Many people assumed that Amazon would still pay the devs 20% of list even if it the free app of the day. Now that I know the nitty-gritty how it actually works I understand why it's actually 0%. If Amazon reduced the price w/o the dev's agreement, he would get 20%. In this case, though, the dev was asked if he wanted to see his app as free app of the day, i.e. you had to opt in. 0% revenue for that is a fair price since in return you get a lot of free exposure, that you, as a dev, have to know and understand how to make the most of it.
Even further down the author actually admits "As we said in our post, we deserved what we got, because we did indeed agree to it". Simply put, if they had asked the right question, and not beat around the bush, they would have gotten it explained.
They make this comment, which I found kind of snot nosed brat kind of comment, back to Amazon at the initial onset:
We’d be happy to reconsider if you decided to pay us the 20% that we agreed to in our original developer agreement, but this new one seems to favour only you, at the expense of us?
Amazon's response is:
... and in fact, with as the Free of the Day for one day, you will receive a subsequent Appstore main page placement for the following 14 days. All these highly valuable placements are at no cost to you. We want to promote your app and in exchange of the placements, at the 0% rev share for one day only.
Amazon never said they would get 20%. Matter of fact, Amazon emphasis that there is no expense to the developers to get potentially highly profitable placement. Their actual technical complaints, slightly valid, accounts for about 7 bullet points, and 20 sentences. Their first technical point is rather naive. Assuming that Amazon would immediately post something is... well stupid. Just cause Google does it, does not mean Amazon is Google.
The developer's use of the words "expense" implied a different meaning to people in marketing and sales. The developer's point was that they would not make money and have costs of supporting the free sales. The marketing / sales / accounting people, think of expense as the cost of doing business. Grasshopper chose his words poorly.
The reality is they do not have enough business savvy. They hopefully will gain this over time.
Its always amusing to me cause in college, CS and Business Admin students mock each other. And yet when it comes to the real world, they both need knowledge from the others area of expertise.
I can't believe ANY developer would submit apps to the AppStore under those conditions. I'm not talking about the "secret" ones, I'm talking about:
"Amazon gets to set the price of your app to whatever they want, without any input from you, or even the chance to reject their price"
That would be a complete deal-killer for almost every developer I know. How would anyone come up with a business plan if they don't know how much their product is going to be sold for?
Is the MarketPlace that awful, that developers would accept these terms from Amazon?
Joe Tablet probably believes the app he downloaded is kicking 20% of the purchase to the developer. It's a dick move.
Blar.
According to the 'developers', to update Android you have to:
- Go to their website download exe file
- Fire up VMWare, realise I donâ(TM)t have XP
- Find old XP Image off DVD
- Copy XP
- Boot XP (upgrade VM, upgrade VM Tools)
- Reboot
- Install Kies (Samsung Software)
- It downloads Dot Net for the next 15 minutes
- It wants to update itself (yes the brand new thing I just downloaded off their website)
- Update (another 85MB download)
- After install Iâ(TM)m in some kind of MP3 playerâ¦what the?
- Spend ages figuring out I have to turn off dev mode, then I have to go to the home screen on the phone (it doesnâ(TM)t work while apps are open)
- Phone appears as connected device (yay!)
- Windows XP spends the next 5 minutes finding new hardware
- Error Dialogue âDevice not responding. To resolve the issue reboot the deviceâ(TM)
- Unplug the device, quit Kies
- Start Kies, replug in the device
- Device appears, and shows an info screen which says âThis is the latest firmwareâ(TM)
- Google solutions, most of which appear to be third party ROMs and Registry hacks that may brick your phone
- Realise itâ(TM)s Telstra thatâ(TM)s holding it up here in AU: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1599816
- Consider installing some custom ROM called âDarkysâ(TM) or something else called âRomKitchenâ(TM)
- Realise itâ(TM)s 11:42pm (2 hours since I started my journey)
- Give up
For comparison:
To Update iPhone from 4.2 to 4.3:
- Plug in, press âupdateâ(TM) button in iTunes
Yup, in order to update Android, you have to install VMWare and dig up copies of XP. Clearly, these guys are top-tier engineers, and everything they write is unbiased and technically well-informed.
Man, I can't wait for iOS 5, because Apple has really innovated this time: over the air updates for a mobile OS! Just wait until Google rip them off and then claim that their OS somehow supported OTA updates since it went live. As if that were possible before Apple invented it!
When did /. become such an apple fanboy site anyway? Shouldn't you iOS dweebs be posting about how Android's higher marketshare doesn't matter over at daringfireball or something?
It's amazing how many problems and complaints would be solved if every ToS, EULA, and online agreement required some kind of electronic signature to be valid. It should be something that would take more than a quick mouse-click to apply.
Impatient people who "just want to see the dancing bunnies" would install an OpenPGP plug-in that makes it "a quick mouse-click" to sign an agreement.
So they tell the public the developers get 20% but tell the developers they will get nothing.
Not a company I want to do business with. Already using their competitors due to their outsourcing to third world states when requested to track sales tax.
Amazon sold it for $0.00? What's 20% of $0.00?
You could correctly argue that the developer received 1000% of the sale price.
So some developers really thought that Amazon was actually going pay them 20% per app downloaded for free out of the kindness of their hearts? Why? How would that possibly benefit Amazon? The way it works now is Amazon eats the hosting costs, and creates thousands of possible "word of mouth" advertising walking billboards...
Sometime I find very strange to see people who seems to use an online service (here a spot to sell their stuff) only to moan about the rules once the boat has left the port. It makes me wonder about who has made the initial choice to be there...
Amazon sold it for $0.00? What's 20% of $0.00? You could correctly argue that the developer received 1000% of the sale price.
The publisher said Amazon claims to give developers 20% of the normal asking price, not the current sale price.
This doesn't really surprise me. My last job was as a technical support rep/SQL scripter for a company that specialized in software that interfaced with e-commerce solutions. As you could guess, I spent a good deal of time helping out customers who sold on Amazon. I remember one story a customer told about how they didn't like to give Amazon full information on the products they sold, even though Amazon threatened to remove them as a seller if they didn't. The reason they wouldn't do it is that Amazon had a funny habit of finding out the statistics on the sales of their products and, if they seemed to be making enough profit, they would put up their own listing and try to undercut the customer's prices. What a way to do business, eh?
I come from a family of farmers, though I'm a programmer and my brothers are project managers. My dad told me a long time ago that grandfather used to say, "Hollar at the butt, rotten to the core.", when discussing sickly trees. He pronounced "hollow" wrong, but the wisdom was that if you knock on a tree near the base and it sounds hollow, then it's rotten all the way through and needs to be removed.
Anyways, just thought someone might find that an interesting piece of history or lore.
You say that the article is not about signing a contract and then say that it's their fault for signing a deal. What kind of legally binding deal exists in your neck of the woods which isn't a contract?
I feel for Shifty Jelly but could almost see stuff like this coming, and more.
While minor compared to his nightmare,
I purchased something from Amazon.com and they charged me tax saying this was in case
they had to pay tax for the transaction in the future, they would be covered.
(Washington state)
California tells Amazon.com they now have to pay tax on transactions, they bail California.
I don't have anything to do with Amazon.com any more,
and I can truly say they lost a lot of business recently.
Newegg.com all the way!! No tax, no lies, and a very
decent return policy that I've never had a need to use.
Newegg.com is just easier to use as well, with all the info one needs
for a product on one page. Yes I'm a fan.
Amazon ATTRACTS developers by giving perception that it pays 20% of sale price for the free give aways.
Amazon PREVENTS developers withdrawing the app from sale once they join.
Amazon REWRITES the terms in an email setting the payment to zero, with a clause preventing you discussing the offer.
So he's revealing the dirty secret about Amazon's store, people aren't making money and if you joined thinking you may be lucky and get a free app day, like him, and get 20% of retail as Amazon promised, then you are being misled. You'll get nothing.
More to the point for me, the figures he reveals show that Amazons dynamic pricing doesn't help sell his app, yet there was huge demand when it was promoted and free. Look at his sales figures, he won't even cover the cost of a server with that revenue, let alone office, development, support....
And the Amazon forced discounting he talks about undermine his sales in other stores, so Amazon needed the fake '20%' to give developers a reason to go with it.
Then the robbery continues on the terms and conditions. You can set the list price of your app but it cannot be any higher on Amazon Appstore than it is on other app stores. So if the list price is $9.99 on Marketplace it has to be $9.99 (or less) on App Store. And like Marketplace you take a 70% of the sale price. But... the sale price and list price are not the same thing. You set the list price, Amazon sets the sale price. Amazon can deep discount your app all the way down to 20% of its list price if they like. So instead of getting $7 revenue from $9.99 you get $2 from $2. Or Amazon could even give the app away and you get nothing at all. Basically they're using your app to fuck you over.
Frankly it's daylight robbery. I'm quite certain that Amazon will launch their own tablets before long and some app writers will be compelled to serve this market, but I wonder if there will be a general revolt over what is going on. They're not in a position to dictate this stuff as Apple might. Perhaps Amazon tablet users can enjoy gimped "Amazon edition" apps where functionality has to be unlocked with micropayments or similar. I certainly don't see the situation as being tolerable even for the more popular apps.
A more fair system if Amazon preferred to compete with other marketplaces would be to allow the developer to set the wholesale price and an MSRP. Amazon would discount within those two bounds, presumably by comparing the price on Marketplace and undercutting it but within agreed limits. I expect Google would reciprocate with its own version of the same and the two markets would compete much like stores do for real world goods. That would be fair. The current situation absolutely isn't.
While they got 100,000 d/ls that doesn't mean they lost 100,000 sales - many people, myself included, will take a shot with a free app to see if it's worth anything. More on this later. What will be interesting is how many people continue their use after a few weeks of months? That is a better indicator of "lost" sales than the initial download.
Since "free" means "just garb it and see if I like it cause it has no cost to me if I don't" to many people a developer should weigh the increased support and fixed costs (more servers if the app is an online service as was the case here) against the value of getting their name out and building awareness of other apps. It also means it will be harder to go back to a higher price if many of your potential customers grab the free one. In many cases, you'd be better off dropping the price to $.99 - it's still at the impulse purchase point (hey, it's not even a buck so no big loss if it sucks) and you get some cash for each d/l. When you rais eteh price again, people are more likely to think - "I missed my chance to grab it cheap" than "WTF - this was free and now you want $?" Plus, when people pay for something, even a small amount, they tend to value it more and are more likely to think it was a good choice and pay in the future as well.
So what to do with the 100k free apps out there? After a while, come out with a paid upgrade to v2. Give it away to paying customers for free to get them, charge the free ones an upgrade fee, and end the v1 service. That way, you've converted the customers that value your product and lowered your costs while getting some cash flowing in as well. If you promised some duration of availability keep that promise; but wen you can work to migrate customers to a paying mode.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
nobody is forcing you to distribute PC or Android applications through an app store. And if you don't like the ecosystems that force you to use an app store (e.g. iOS or Windows Phone), don't develop for those platforms.
Would you be giving the same advice if Android had near-zero market share? Because that's how it is on the video game consoles. There are no well-known consoles with a fairly open environment comparable to Android with "Unknown sources". Nor (if CronoCloud, CastrTroy, and other Slashdot regulars are to be believed) are there enough "home theater PCs", or PCs used as if they were consoles, to make a market for games with a home theater PC mode. There's only one console with anything like Apple's App Store, and that's the Indie Games section on Xbox 360. The other two consoles and the main area of Xbox 360 are even more restrictive than Apple.
When my phone started telling me 15 or 20 times a day that the appstore wasn't responding, I uninstalled it. I hadn't even asked it to run. That was when I discovered the dirty little secret. None of the free daily apps I had downloaded would run without the appstore. I ended up having to uninstall them all.
The big guy pisses over the little guy and thinks he should be grateful for the refreshment.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Oh boy, if we do this, we'll get rich. Read and do research? You're crazy, bub. I don't need to do any of that. I just need to sit back and let the money flow in. While I'm at it, I'll also sign up for Groupon. I heard I'll get some crazy business out of it. No need to plan or do any research for that either. The money just jumps straight into my wallet without any effort. After this I have two more plans and then I'll retire in my 30s. I'm going to make money by going to garage sales and selling things I bought cheap for hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on ebay. When I'm done with that, I'll make money by putting ads in newspapers.
It's amazing how many problems and complaints would be solved ...
Your mistake is assuming everyone wants these problems and complaints to be solved. It is not in Amazon's interest to solve them.
Amazon is particularly a vile company. Its entire business is taking advantage of internet. Which was a government funded project with amazing amount of intellectual property created in universities by extraordinarily creative people given away for free and in the public domain. Just the sendmail or http or ftp protocol or mosaic browser alone is worth million times more than that stupid "one-click" patent of Bezos. But it plays hardball with other web sites over its "invention". It sticks the government with all the costs of enforcement of patents of trivial ideas and the litigation etc. Then it sticks to the letter of law and refuses to collect sales tax for other states.
All we need is two or three more unpatriotic anti-American myopically selfish companies, to bring America down. Nah, Amazon alone is enough.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
> This hasn't been a financial success, but it's not hurt them that badly either.
Actually it did hurt them bad. They sold something like 2 copies (at 2 bucks) a day afterward, but had to buy freakin *new* servers (at what? $1000 bucks) just to support all the new people.
This comment is more about apple than amazon, but something that concerns me is the issue of customer ownership. Whether the app is free or costs money, there is the issue of who gets the customer in their database. As a small developer, I sold my product and I got to know who the customer was. They went into my rolodex. Then if I had something to say to them about a new version, or a bug fix, or even to contact them and ask them if they would like to buy something else, I could. When the app store keeps the customer for themselves, all that potential for follow-on communication isn't there, and after a ton of software goes out for free, you haven't earned any money, and you customer list hasn't gotten any longer. It has to be a bitter-sweet thing to hear how many copies went out
you will receive a subsequent Appstore main page placement for the following 14 days.
A main page placement for a paid mobile app seems pretty valuable to me. I would do a free for one day deal, and get zero on that day in exchange for 14 days of possible profit.
Now if in those 14 days I made nothing, then there is a problem, either with the placement or with my application.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Tried Pocket Casts for a few minutes. Found it inferior to the already pretty terrible Google Listen. Uninstalled.