Amazon App Store 'Rotten To the Core,' Says Dev 346
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."
Re:math is hard (Score:2, Informative)
From TF- no, wait, from the second sentence of the summary:
"their terms say that they pay developers 20% of the asking price of an app, even when they give it away free."
RTFS I guess?
Re:Reading is fundamental (Score:5, Informative)
Speaking of which, it seems like you didn't RTFA, which states that Amazon publicly declares 20% to developers, even for free apps, but then sends an email saying it's actually 0% and that you're not allowed to publicly discuss it. That was followed by a list of other major problems with the store.
Even the usual Slashdot logic which predicts that giving away something for free is "free advertising" that somehow generates sales didn't happen in this situation. Fail all around.
Re:To those saying "Read the Contract" (Score:4, Informative)
There wasn't any confusion. From TFA:
Amazon is being predatory here, and asking developers (who are often desperate for exposure) to give away their app, in order to promote Amazon. A heated debate broke out in our office about whether we should or not.
It was clear that they understood that they were being asked to "give away their app".
Re:Facts (Score:5, Informative)
There are a handful of Terms of Service that are tracked by the EFF project TOSBack [tosback.org].
Unfortunately, only two Amazon policies [tosback.org] are being tracked.
Re:Biased Summary (Score:2, Informative)
Right, but they did have to upgrade their server hardware to deal with those 101,491 users they wouldn't have had otherwise and they couldn't pay for it out of income from the app
I was really curious about this statement because it just didn't sound right. Why would a company choose to allow their item to be the "FAOTD" if they couldn't reasonable handle the demand? But, I did the unthinkable and RTFA and sure enough, they did mention server capacity as well as additional customer support for their app to the tune of "300 emails" that gave them "a headache".
But, you know what, I have to agree with the GP on this one, TFS makes it out to be that Amazon is the bad guy here but TBH it sounds more like an attempt to redirect personal responsibility for making a clearly bad business decision. Here's the sequence that the blog points out:
So, I stopped reading there.
Long story short, this developer has a false sense of worth for their "baby", clearly understood what they were getting into, made a hugely bad business decision (welcome to being an entrepreneur) and is now trying to blame Amazon for causing his pain, instead of blaming his own decision and also appears to be trying to pull a "I told you so" to his partner and rub it into his face. despite the fact that he (admittedly) agreed to it none-the-less.
I'm so sick of this "I didn't do anything wrong" idiotic blog posts, when they clearly laid out everything they did wrong, just because they can't admit they made a bad decision. Instead of learning from their mistake they want to demon-ize "the big evil corporation".
Re:Reading is fundamental (Score:4, Informative)
You can cross link by putting a link to the comment numbered link on the top right in this case #36966086 [slashdot.org].
Having said that, that post is totally beside the point. The way the deal is publicly presented makes it look like it's a good opportunity for developers. You get a chance to get some cash now and increase your installed base at the risk of some loss of full price sales. You also get good placement. That makes Amazon's app store more attractive for those developers.
The trick is that when you actually do get offered a free placement, then it turns out that the deal which is published is not the deal which is really available. By that time you have already committed to Amazon's app store so it is too late to back out. This looks to me like a bait and switch [wikipedia.org] situation which would be illegal for a consumer product sale.
It's important to note, that if you had Read The Fine Article Properly you would have seen that they went into this as an experiment and are publishing not to complain but to warn others. You would also have seen that Amazon stated that the promotion gives
"highly valuable placements"
but it turned out that the influence on app sales beyond the promotion was very small, possibly even negative.
Further note that, even when asked
If I read this correctly youâ(TM)d like to give away our application for free, and pay us nothing?
Amazon responded
instead of just clearly stating that there would be no revenue. What does that mean? That Amazon will take 0% of the revenue? That the promotion will cost you 0% of the revenue or that you will get 0% of the revenue. Now, thanks to Shift Jelly's valuable posting, we know exactly.