Amazon’s Disruptive Android App Store Now Open To Developers — Full Details | Hacker News Reader

Amazon’s Disruptive Android App Store Now Open To Developers — Full Details

techcrunch.com

120 pointsatularora59 comments

Free for the first year, $99 fee waived. Nice. Reading through the agreement though, there are a few interesting things.

1. You have to provide Amazon with all software that is yours on the Market 2. You have to add Amazon specific DRM to the apps you add to Amazon and cannot use any other DRM 3. There are privacy requirements on embedded advertising 4. The parentheses in the agreement are not well balanced! There are a lot of missing closing )s.

So you cannot pick and choose which of your software goes on Amazon and which on the Market. The DRM means you would at the very least need 2 versions of your software if you use Google's licence server "DRM" - one with Google's technology and another version with Amazon's.

I'd say that if you go the DRM route, you'd want to use Amazon or the Market, but not both. If Amazon turns out to be more popular with paying customer this could really have an impact. Especially the "all your Apps belong to us" requirement - I think having a free-with-adverts version of an App on the Market and a paid version on Amazon is forbidden under this agreement.

Policing rogue advertising is good, though I doubt Amazon will really kick anyone off for using AdMob or any of the big players.

Also, #4 shows that the agreement was not written by a Lisp programmer. It makes reading parts of the agreement tricky.

Wow..Amazon gets to set the price on your app. Developers only get to recommend. Certainly original. If this takes off it could have a significant impact on application pricing for more than just Android devices.

iTunes put it in people's heads that a song is worth $1. Amazon is working hard at saying that a book is worth $10. This is the same model - by setting the price for individual apps, Amazon is going to be setting the price for the entire industry. I'd assume Amazon would almost always price an app lower than developers would (and I doubt you'll be able to game the system by suggestion for 2x what you would have otherwise), meaning an overall downward pressure in app prices.

Would benefit users...seems impossible to tell whether it'll benefit developers (or whether other aspects of the store will compensate them, such as with increased sales).

The nice thing is that Amazon can basically continuously and automatically A/B test different price points for each app. Drop the price by a penny, is revenue better than projected over an hour? Ok, drop it by another penny, etc.

Ten years ago Amazon was burned by price testing. This seems an appropriate time to try again.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/51392/Amazon_apologiz...

Burned? It doesn't appear to have actually hurt them, and they ended up with better policies because of it. Doesn't sound like a burn to me.

And that article even states that they will continue to have price a/b testing, just a more fair sort. They aren't 'trying again', they are continuing.

It might have been bad PR but you can bet they've never stopped testing.

They still price test and have added nearly $80B in market cap since they were "burned", so I don't think they were burned too badly.

It'd be nice if, when developers give their 10 days notice (which is what is required to remove the app from the store), Amazon locks the price.

I could see some pretty angry developers pulling their app, and having amazon's "automated" pricing engine heavily reduce the app's price at the same time.

It says you are guaranteed 20% of the list price, even if Amazon give it away for free.

Careful making overly sweeping conclusions though.

What works to grow and establish a market may not be best later. Right now app stores and e-books are still up and coming, it's more important to get them accepted and popular than to maximize efficiency or revenue. Once they are more mature, things may change.

I have a feeling Amazon is better at pricing my app than I am.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader

Well, maybe, but most of us suffer from under-pricing our apps. Amazon's deal only allows them to further discount from your stated 'list price'. I don't see how they can improve things in this common case. I suspect (am utterly sure) they will price things to maximize Amazon's income, not mine. Which may mean deeply discounting my app as part of some campaign to boost their total sales - which won't benefit me one iota.

So make your list price higher than your current price and let Amazon figure out what's best. Unless I'm missing something, Amazon's getting a percentage, so their income is maximized when your income is maximized.

That's naieve. They have many products. They may use yours as a 'loss leader', they may experiment with your price, they may decide your product is worse than another one and position it as the low-tier offering and choose a price to enhance the sales of the higher-tier product (not yours).

You can't set the list price any higher than anywhere else.

i. List Price. The “List Price” for an App is an amount that does not exceed, at any time, the lowest list price or suggested retail price for such App (including any similar edition, version or release) available or previously available on any Similar Service or the lowest actual price at which you make or made such App available for sale through any Similar Service. You will update the List Price for each App as necessary to ensure that it meets the requirements of this section 5i.

You could just differentiate your product by releasing the Amazon super version that includes some trivial feature not available in the Android market version. Clearly such a feature is worth doubling the list price.

they will price things to maximize Amazon's income, not mine

But, I assume, Amazon and the developer split the sale price? If so, then the more money amazon make, the more money you make, right?

"Amazon gets to set the price on your app. Developers only get to recommend. Certainly original."

This is how the vast majority of retail products work. The manufacturer suggests a retail price, but it is up to the retailer to determine what the consumer ultimately pays. Software was sold this way for several decades.

So it strikes me as more "retro" than "original". Not that it's a bad thing -- I love the idea of Amazon split-testing my pricing, because it lets me focus more on the app itself.

In retail, the manufacturer also sets the wholesale price, which is often around 60% of list. In Amazon's store, Amazon can decide to pay the developer anywhere between 20% and 70% of list price.

The manufacturer suggests a retail price, but it is up to the retailer to determine what the consumer ultimately pays.

This is quite different because in retail the wholesale cost is negotiated between the manufacturer and retailer. Therefore, the price that the retailer chooses to sell the product at to consumers does not change how much the manufacturer makes (except indirectly, by affecting quantity sold and therefore bought from the manufacturer). Coca Cola gets the same amount of money per can if Walmart sells the cans for 20 cents each or $2 each.

In this case, Amazon essentially gets to choose not only the retail price, but the wholesale price, except that the prices are at a fixed ratio to one another and there is a price floor on the wholesale price based on the suggested retail price you gave.

Wal-mart is a bad example to use here. They actually tell companies what they are willing to pay; and everyone falls in line. Thats why some products you buy at WalMart aren't as good a quality as they are at other places. Companies make cheaper products to meet the demands of walmart.

Amazon is constantly changing prices on its books anyway. If you leave a bunch of books in your shopping cart for several weeks, then every time you go to your shopping cart they'll popup a notice showing what items have changed price, from X to Y.

Yes, they do. Our site tracks pricing on Amazon products and recommends when is the best time to buy.

Amazon pricing on a large range of products pretty much change daily; for example Books:

http://www.happybuy.com/search//all/books/by-savings

Great site. I was just thinking it would be nice to have some notification when books drop in price significantly. Most price changes are a few cents or a dollar or so, but sometimes they can change by $10, $20, and I've seen in the $50 range once or twice.

Thanks for the comments. Yes, we'll automatically email you whenever a price drops for any product you sign-up to via the site.

In the next week we'll also be adding optional price tracking for any item you already have in a public Amazon Wishlist.

Reminds me of the success Steam has had fiddling with their pricing structure. Can't find references now, but reports say that they've been ridiculously successful with it.

Though I assume that Valve consults with the publishers before putting an item on sale. I guess Amazon figures it would be inefficient to have to do that will the multitude of apps they are expecting.

Finally! IMHO Google's Android Market is the weakest part of the platform right now. I am fond of my Android phone but it really is a pain to find new apps. AFAICT, the only way to really do it is from the handset, which is not nearly as useful as being able to do it from my desktop machine. Hopefully the existence of Amazon's marketplace will motivate Google to get their act together. If not, maybe I'll just switch to the Amazon market.

Android has several issues and I agree that the market app sucks, so I use appbrain. Give a try if you haven't already. It gives decent recommendations and you can filter apps by hotness among other things.

I think the issue, though, is not if you (or other people on HN) use AppBrain: it's if your customers are going to be able to find your app. I doubt that a significant chunk of Android users actually use something like AppBrain, so a pre-installed Amazon Appstore might help those people.

I never implied otherwise (I agree), just spreading the word about appbrain.

No one notice that you must get all your apps through Amazon approval before you can make them available for sale elsewhere?

b. Timing of Deliveries. ... You will deliver future Apps within 14 days before the initial availability date you designate for the App (the “Initial Availability Date”). The Initial Availability Date must be no later than the first date you permit the App to be listed for pre-order or sale on any Similar Service. ...

EDIT: And updates as well. So no more releasing emergency break fixes.

Wow, thanks.

International developers still get robbed. Coding from Europe, i should give USA 30 per cent to sell my app to European public? And that means, 30 per cent to Amazon, from what is left 30 per cent to USA, from what is left 20 per cent to my government..... ridiculous...

It's not even going to be available in Europe at launch. It'll be USA only.

What about free apps?

I would be OK with my $0.99 app costing $0.79 if Amazon thinks it sells more but I wouldn't want my free app to suddenly cost money.

Amazon is a big player and has potential to disrupt the Android app economy. Already their pricing mechanism is set up where they WILL undercut the Android marketplace. That is why people will choose to buy and download Android apps from Amazon. They have an easy payment system that millions have purchased from. And they will work with carriers and manufacturers to get their Amazon AppStore on as many phones as possible. Overall, I think this is good for developers because more people will purchase apps. But the developers will lose control over pricing and you'll have two markets - Android marketplace at retail price and the Amazon appstore at discount price. Maybe people will download free apps from google's marketplace, and paid apps from Amazon's. Not as seamless as Apple's ecosystem, but people like a deal.

Not sure this deserves the excitement of the headline. Amazon's been trolling for mobile developers for months now, and there are many other app stores doing the same.

The question is which ones will get enough traction with consumers to matter.

This might actually work.

One of the main reasons why Apple's App Store took off is that 100 million customers already had an iTunes account with a credit card on file.

Amazon is one of the few other online retailers that has payment details for 100 million customers. Along with tons of retail experience, that gives it a huge advantage over Google.

The only thing that worries me is that Amazon is still very US-centric. It only has localized sites for Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom. 8 countries is far too few. Compare that to the 91 countries where Apple has App Stores.

Wonder if Amazon are also considering selling apps on AWS via this appstore?

Would easily work for EC2 images but might also work in the "platform as a service" space like the sort of thing Heroku is doing. Or just "buy a blog" e.g. wordpress can sell via the appstore and it's running on the AWS cloud.

EC2 has had an app store (called "paid AMIs") for a while. It wouldn't make sense to use the same store for Android and EC2 given the platform differences.

"So why, aside from these pricing differences, would consumers want to use this Amazon App Store at all? There are a few answers to that question.

The first is that there are manufacturers making Android devices that decide not to partner with Google to offer the official suite of Google applications (including Android Market)."

The market is available independent of google apps, the only bar required to get the android market is to show that the device you are shipping meats API compatibility, which I assume Amazon will want to enforce as well (who wants to distribute an app to a device that has hacked android to the point of API incompatibility?).

That said, this looks cool, and at the very least this will light a fire under the asses of the android market team!

Would the various "markets" inter-operate? Does the device sold with operator firmware have access to the Amazon Android Market?

I would assume that Amazon would release an app in the default Google Android appstore which would then let the user access the Amazon Android appstore.

...which is explicitly banned by Google's Android Market Agreement:

4.5 Non-Compete. You may not use the Market to distribute or make available any Product whose primary purpose is to facilitate the distribution of Products outside of the Market.

http://www.android.com/us/developer-distribution-agreement.h...

More likely, they'd make arrangements with carriers/manufacturers to have the app pre-installed, much as they do with their current Amazon MP3 app.

Yes. As with any real computing device, you can install software from anywhere. In Android, you have to check a checkbox first, but that's all.

Not necessarily... AT&T blocks non-Market apps on their phones.

Any company whose logo is the Death Star...

The marketplace is just an app, remember.

So far I've spoken to a copuple of different devs who, when I asked what they thought of Amazon setting the price, said "well there's a field for me to enter 'list price', so what are you talking about?"

Are a lot of people going to miss that detail and assume that the list price they set is what it will be sold for?

Yes. Me. I have refrained from submitting my apps now for 2 reasons:

1) They say I have to get their approval 14 days before submitting new apps to Similar Services

2) 20% of "List Price" that they can set???? I'm still confused on this, and I get A LOT of sales from the Market, so I'm not interested in Amazon deciding what's best for me.

Interesting difference: Amazon set the price of the app, not you.

Odd that they got to this before they released the Kindle SDK.

Maybe Amazon can do better device targeting aside from resolution and OS version. Device name would be good...

The best part is the code review. I hate the current anything goes/permission slip method.

I don't think they will do a code review. They won't even have the source. I should think the'll just do basic testing as Apple does.

If you are guaranteed 20% of the list price, I forsee devs overpricing their apps in the Amazon store to get a higher minimum payout.

Additionally, even if the best default price is much lower, it just makes their apps look that much better when Amazon's app store says "50% off" or "86% off."

Your list price can't be more than anywhere else you sell it.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2071795

Just wait for devices with ONLY amazon store and no way to install anything outside of it. Just like at&t+motorola screwed with the back flip in similar ways.

And don't be foled, this is probably their monetization strategy, not a consequence.

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