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.
It go wrong app pocket casts android#
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. I was firmly against, my business partner for. A heated debate broke out in our office about whether we should or not. We want to promote your app and in exchange of the placements, at the 0% rev share for one day only.Īll this seemed way too one sided to us, Amazon is being predatory here, and asking developers (who are often desperate for exposure) to give away their app, in order to promote Amazon.
It go wrong app pocket casts free#
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.Īll these highly valuable placements are at no cost to you. It hosted the launch of the likes of Angry Birds Rio, Plants v. The Free App of the Day promotion is the most valuable and visible spot in the store. 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? I appreciate that Amazon is trying to build up it’s store, and get more users, but the problem is at the moment you have the reputation of being ‘The place where I get my free apps’ and for a developer like us who doesn’t put advertising into our applications, that can only be a bad thing. If I read this correctly you’d like to give away our application for free, and pay us nothing? That’s very generous of you, but we like being paid for our work. So we asked them to confirm, what seemed a ridiculous proposition: The emphasis there was actually added by them in their email. The current price of this placement is at 0% rev share for that one day you are placed. It is an opportunity to build your brand especially in association with a brand like Amazon’s. We have seen tremendous results from this promotion spot and believe it will bring you a great deal of positive reviews and traffic. We would like to include your app “” in our Free App of the Day calendar. Before being featured by Amazon, you get an email like this one:Īs you may already know, the Free App of the Day offer placement is one of the most visible and valuable spaces on the Amazon Appstore. But here’s the dirty secret Amazon don’t want you to know, they don’t pay developers a single cent. To both consumers and naive developers alike, this seems like a big chance to make something rare in the Android world: real money.
Publicly their terms say that they pay developers 20% of the asking price of an app, even when they give it away free. Back then people were hailing it as the solution to the problems with the Google Market, industry pundits like Andy Ihnatko called it ‘ An Excellent Work in Progress‘.Īmazon’s biggest feature by far, has been their Free App Of The Day promotion. About 3 months ago, we set off on a little experiment into the world of the Amazon App Store.