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Comment by tjbiddle | Hacker News Reader

If a consumer purchases something then wouldn't Amazon be losing 70% of that as they have to pay the developer of the app the consumer made the purchase on/for?

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given their history with paying developers that are the app of the day on their store[1], I can see them finding a loophole to avoid paying devs who collect payments with coins.

[1] http://blog.shiftyjelly.com/2011/08/02/amazon-app-store-rott...

As of now, they are claiming they will be paying out exactly the same as if your app was purchased with dollars.

It seems like that's a major part of this push - if you want to receive any of these free Amazon dollars, submit to the app store.

https://developer.amazon.com/help/faq.html#AmazonCoins

The point remains; I still have very little faith in Amazon's android adventures given their shady history.

This is sort of a very different situation - whether or not you agree that their offer to be featured as the free app of the day is valuable, they were upfront that the rev-share in that situation is 0% when they make the offer.

In this situation they are claiming that it's exactly the same as cash to developers - that is, you will receive 70% of the purchase price. I have absolutely no reason to believe that they're attempting to mislead or be dishonest.

What shady history is that?

They can probably only spend them at the company store.

Yes, but 1) not every coin is likely to actually get redeemed, and 2) the total loss they incur is more or less a controlled marketing investment in order to jump-start user familiarity with the coin program anyway.

Whoops, complete oversight on my part. Thanks for catching that!

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