Recently I was Tweeted by the Amazon App Developer account about their Success Bundle. This offers budding developers for the Amazon Appstore “up to $700 in bundled services,” including a “$100 ad campaign with Advertise Your App,” as well as “doubled earnings on up to $500 with the Amazon Mobile Ad Network,” and “$100 in AWS promotional credit.” This is a seasonal offer, “designed to help developers new to the Amazon Appstore drive installs, monetize, and scale in time for the holidays,” and runs until November 1st.
This makes me wonder how far Amazon is trying to goose Appstore numbers, which continue to lag the iOS App Store and the Google Play Store. It’s not the first initiative Amazon has launched lately. For instance, in August it rolled out Amazon Underground for developers already in business on competing stores – “a one-of-a-kind experience where apps, games, and in-app items are 100% free for customers, and Amazon pays developers based on the amount of time your Amazon Underground app is used.” The program does offer more inducements and arguments than straight cash: “With Amazon Underground, you can focus less on how to monetize your apps and focus more on creating great user experiences.” However, the incentive to “get paid starting from the very first minute your Amazon Underground app is used” is obviously considerable.
Amazon needs the buy-in. Data shared by App Figures in January 2015 indicates that Amazon, although seeing its Appstore double in number of apps between 2013 and 2014, still only has around 293,000 on board. The Google Play Store, meanwhile, leapfrogged Apple’s iOS App Store with some 1.43 million apps by end 2014.
Where Amazon goes with this remains to be seen, though my own Amazon Appstore experience is pretty contradictory and frustrating. I’ve yet to see much inducement to switch away from the Google Play Store, unless it’s the free app offers that Amazon periodically puts out there. And now that Android .apks are pretty much cross-platform onto the new Kindle Fire series, and the Fire 5.0 Bellini OS is closer to Android than ever before, the Amazon Appstore looks likely to slip ever further behind Amazon’s other online offerings. Not that that will make the new Kindle Fire 7 any less of a hit, I suspect.
