WWTBAM Bored

This week, without much fanfare, Amazon launched its newest effort to tweak existing pricing models. For quite some time, Amazon has offered a "Free App of the Day," a normally paid app that is offered for free for one day (sometimes at holiday seasons they had a "free app" weekend, offering 20 or 30 apps for free during that time). They've done away with the FAOTD and replaced it with Amazon Underground.

Amazon Underground is a collection of about 500 apps for now. App developers voluntarily submit their apps and Amazon keeps track of the usage. Developers are paid 12 cents per hour for each app while it's being used. Those who, like myself, have a Kindle device can download the apps directly, but those with standard Android phones and tablets need to first download an "Amazon Underground" app from the Amazon store. The Amazon Underground version of these apps is not available through Google.

While many popular apps have been technically free, the developers make money through in-app purchases, methods of getting extended playing time, hints, or the ability to make the game easier by purchasing items that improve the player's powers or skills. Amazon Underground apps must be "Actually free" which means no more payment for the full or extended version of the game or for buying in-game items.

Most of the games that I saw were either games that had been around for awhile and whose popularity may have peaked or games that are tie-ins with movie or TV shows. It makes sense for Disney to want to find ways of keeping kids playing Frozen or Inside Out games forever even if parents' wallets have limits. What's not clear now is how Amazon plans to make money off these apps. The apps do include ads for Amazon but, other than that and the publicity and added traffice that offering anything for free generates, it's not clear how they will make direct revenue. But then again, Amazon has been willing to experiment with pricing and products in the past, often without being clear about what the long term effects will be. If offering 500 free apps drives Android users to the Amazon store where they can also buy the thousands of non-free apps, then they may just have something.

http://www.wired.com/2015/08/amazon-und ... p-payment/

Well, I learned something today the first time I tried to download one of these Amazon Underground apps to my Kindle. It doesn't work.

Apparently, the developers had to revise every one of their apps to make them work with Amazon Underground and those revised apps are only compatible with the 3rd and 4th generation Kindle Fires. I have a 2nd generation model (it's still barely two years old).

So Amazon took away a feature everyone liked (the Free App of the Day) and replaced it with something that a fairly sizable number of customers of their own proprietary product can't use. That's great marketing.

My hunch is that fairly soon someone will figure out a workaround that allows me to use these apps but workarounds are almost always a big hassle.

I "won" a chance at a for-pay app for free that I admit I didn't even go after; offer has probably expired by now. I won it by buying something via Amazon. They must have a lot of such winners.

So far I've only downloaded free apps, & few of those. I'd actually pay for apps that actually worked that would do stuff on this android that android doesn't officially allow (like play music files in a format they don't support, & play Adobe Flash stuff). I've tried a free app for the music files; not only did it not work, but I started getting chrome search results in Cyrillic. De-installed it fast.