Amazon Underground - Is this a joke?

How benevolent of Amazon to make the announcement that they are going to ‘give away’ fully functional apps. No adverts and no initial payment for the app. So what’s the attraction for the developer? The princely sum of $0.002 per minute of usage. This equates to 1c for a 5 minute usage time of your app. Oh you lucky developers- a FULL PENNY!!!

Of course, the comment sections for the news report of this kindness, are full of people very excited that the ‘annoying’ ads are going away. Sure people, the devs will continue to spend months, if not years, creating games and apps to get the golden prize of a penny. By the way, I’m sure that you wont mind when your next paycheck from Red Robin is $0.002 because, you see, I’m not a fan of paying for my food or service. I’d prefer to get it all for free, or at most, a penny or two.

People really are dumb and Amazon is even dumber.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1003016361&ref_=mas_surl_undrgrnd

If i´d get $0.01 for every 5 minutes of play, i would make $120 instead of $40 per for one of my apps. Games with long sessions could really benefit from this.

Good luck with that. I have mirrored apps on both Google Play and Amazon (both with ads) and the return from Amazon is 90% less than GP.

My apps are ‘quick fun’ type apps, as you’d use waiting for a bus etc, and so 1c to 2c per day isn’t going to cut it.

It’s one time deal, Amazon will bump his app and change rules :wink: he have to because there is no profit to pay for some 3rd party app usage

It doesn’t say anywhere you can’t place ads on your app…

I think this concept is very interesting. May not work for all apps but for apps and games with long sessions it may be far better than ads.

Does anybody have an idea how they make money with that? Somewhere the money has to come from.

Does anyone know how they count the number of minutes? My application partly runs in background. I guess they count only the time where the app is visible, right? Unfortunately I don’t have an idea how many minutes this would be for my application since it is a music player which very often runs while the display is off or another app is in foreground.

The whole point of the ‘Underground Model’ is that the app is completely free with no in-app purchases or adverts - and 1c per 5 minutes to the dev.

Amazon isn’t giving anything away, other than a fraction of revenue for devs.

Apparently they monitor ‘onPause’, ‘onStart’, and ‘onStop’ etc. You have to integrate their SDK to get that elusive penny.

Amazon Underground App Usage Measurement. Underground Royalties will be calculated based solely on usage analytics we collect and will be net of any usage we determine resulted from sources other than legitimate use by end users (such as from bots or automated software). For purposes of calculating Underground Royalties, an Amazon Underground App is “used” only while it is in the foreground and the device is actively being used by an end user (and not, for instance, while the Amazon Underground App is running in the background or the device is locked). Our determination of the usage of your Amazon Underground App will be the sole measurement of usage for purposes of calculating Underground Royalties, even if it differs from usage data you may collect. In addition, Underground Royalties are due only on usage by customers in countries where Amazon Underground is available and on devices where Amazon Underground is available.

Great, but they have a terms&conditions, which don’t say you can’t use ads

They also have a specific review process for underground ads and an ad-filled app will be punted before going live.

I see your point but, once again, where it says that?

Any idea how they make money with that?

I think its desperate days for Amazon as far as the phone market is concerned. I suggest its a last-ditch effort to create a viable market, and if it fails, they will shut up shop on the app market anyways.

Even as we speak it appears their shelving any more research/time into the Fire phone.

Amazon Curtails Development of Consumer Devices - WSJ

“Dozens of engineers who worked on failed smartphone are laid off as company retrenches”

This is really uncommon for Amazon to shelf anything so thing must be really bad. I wonder if Fire TV will be ditched too - there are rumors it is about to be replaced with new version so I suppose not. Kidle Fire tablets though?

Do you really think Amazon will close its own app store? Although it’s not as big as Google play and Apple store, but it’s still the third biggest app market out there, lots of weird stuff going there recently

It’s not third biggest app store. We have Windows store, what is a lot bigger than amazon. We have chinese stores, they are such big like Google Play. Amazon is really small.