The Evolution of Technology

Posts Tagged ‘Shift’

If you want to get paid for your apps, don’t give them away for free. There’s nothing remotely controversial about that statement, yet it’s the overriding theme in the most recent developer outcry regarding the Amazon App Store.

To ensure everyone’s on the same page: Amazon recently opened its own Android app store, which puts more of a focus on paid applications rather than free ones. Since the Android Market is already pre-installed on new Android handsets, Amazon has had to promote the store heavily. One way it has done this is with a free app of the day, in which they give away a normally premium app for 24 hours. That’s a great deal for them, but developers should know by now that it’s not all that hot for them.

In fact, Shift Jelly, the outraged developer, knew of this. As they detail in the above-linked blog post, they initially declined Amazon’s offer to become the free app of the day. They knew that their business model revolved around selling the app, and so giving it away probably wasn’t the best idea. But Amazon came back with the typical product placement arguments, claiming that exposure from being the free app of the day, combined with 14 subsequent days of main page placement, would increase sales overall.