Comment by hullo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hullo | Hacker News Reader

He knew it was a bad deal, and that it didn't seem to work with their business model, but he did it any way (as pressured by other people in the company, which he admits). There's absolutely no surprises for them in this post, just regret. Sure, they didn't "realize" that it would garner so many free downloads, but that was always a chance, and in any case could have been quickly determined before agreeing by contacting other developers of featured apps.

The one piece of legitimate news here is that app of the day developers aren't being compensated at all, but that comes no where near justifying "rotten to the core", especially as they're all well aware of the terms when they agree to them.

He seems overly concerned with people who download the app just because they think it will trigger some micropayment to the developer, but that can't be a large number of people (developers paying attention to the launch terms of the market) and in any case are very unlikely to make up much of his support burden.

I'm not sure that they knew it was a bad deal.

In the Apple store, if you got that many downloads and that kind of placement, the traffic from the various lists and high placement for 7 days would convert to many many paid sales over the following days.

We suspected it was a bad deal, but tried it anyway as an experiment. Our blog post wanted to point that out, but more so we took issue with the fact that most people think Amazon pays 20% of the asking price even when an app is given away. Their agreement with devs says as much. No one seems to know that to be featured you have to agree to 0%. Again we agreed, but the secrecy is where our beef lies, we wanted to make that public.

I agree strongly that Amazon needs to make this clearer in their emails an admin pages (listing earnings that don't exist is terrible) but as far as their agreement goes, I think you are mistaken.

Section 2.a. of the Amazon Appstore agreement, emphasis mine:

"a. Royalty. For each sale of an App, we will pay you a royalty (“Royalty”) equal to the greater of (i) 70% of the purchase price or (ii) 20% of the List Price (defined in and subject to section 5i) as of the purchase date. No Royalty is payable for Apps with a List Price of $0.00. Such purchase price excludes taxes and any separately stated fees or charges. A Royalty is due only for sales for which we have received final payment from or on behalf of an end user. If an App is purchased using a credit card or bank account deduction mechanism, final payment will be deemed to have occurred when the applicable credit card company or bank has fully settled the payment for the applicable purchase."

I strongly doubt that "most people" think that Amazon pays 20% of the asking price to the dev. Maybe if you limited your audience to "Android developers very interested in the Amazon App Store", but that's really a pretty limited audience, and not who your app is targeted to. Has Amazon ever trumpeted that 20% figure to the public? No. I mean, I work for a competitor, and am ready and quite willing to see the flaws in their model, that's a horrible thing to compete against, but it absolutely does not surprise me that they're not giving away their money. I mean: it's clearly not necessary. Once they run out of indie devs willing to give their app away for nothing other than incredibly great exposure, then maybe they'll need to start paying out, but not before.

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