11 ms·
Amazon Appstore will reduce its developer revenue cut
- caymanjim 5y agoAmazon has an app store? For what, Kindle/Fire type devices?
- simcop2387 5y agoAll android devices actually. You can usually side load it onto any android device
- NikolaeVarius 5y agoIts been around for a decade.
- jbverschoor 5y agoGood thing they’re cutting, because obv, it’s not worth the same cut as other companies that properly promote their AppStore. This is just a play to nudge apple to reduce prices by trying a new anchor
- bogwog 5y ago> This is just a play to nudge apple to reduce prices by trying a new anchor Not really, this is just them copying Apple and Google. This fee reduction only applies to developers making less than $1 million per year in revenue, which IIRC is the same thing the others are doing. (although to be fair, there probably aren't a ton of devs making more than $1m per year on their store lol) I think this is most likely a ploy to stave off regulation. In other words, they're doing the exact same thing Apple/Google are doing for the exact same reasons.
- jrochkind1 5y ago> although to be fair, there probably aren't a ton of devs making more than $1m per year on their store lol Why would you assume that? I don't know if there are or not. If you have, oh, 5 or 10 developers working for a company, it better have $1 million/year in revenue to pay them all. I don't know how many entities selling apps in an app store have more than 5 developers, or otherwise how many have more than $1 million in revenue.
- jbverschoor 5y agoDidn’t notice the <1m. Then yes, they’re following.
- Forge36 5y agoI have it, generally i don't use it. I think it's primary purpose is their own devices but they didn't device lock their own app.
- salamandersauce 5y agoYeah. It was also made available on BB10 when they added Android compatibility near the end. I used it more when they handed out free apps every day.
- bogwog 5y ago> It was also made available on BB10 when they added Android compatibility near the end. BB10 launched with Android compatibility, IIRC. I know that the first phone they released with it (BB Z10) had it.
- adamqureshi 5y agoYes. I would like know too. APP store for what?
- bsharitt 5y agoThey technically still offer for generic Android, but for the most part it is for Fire devices.
- cableshaft 5y agoThe way the headline is worded made me think it was giving developers less money, but it sounds like it's actually giving them more money as it's reducing Amazon's cut. So yeah, seems good for devs on that platform.
- tolbish 5y agoDefinitely misleading. It should say "Amazon will reduce its dev. revenue cut..."
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- lamontcg 5y agoThe title on the actual article reads exactly that way.
- fullstop 5y agoIt's also encouraging them to use AWS instead of Google Cloud/Microsoft Azure/etc.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sheikheddy 5y ago...what? This sounds like a blatant way to reduce the amount paid out, like their backloaded stock offers. Edit: Actually read TFA, I was mistaken, this is about reducing the fee charged to app developers. On surface a good thing, didn't even know Amazon had an app store.
- castlecrasher2 5y agoIt's a terrible title for sure, I imagine most would interpret it the same way you and I initially did.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- chrisseaton 5y ago> Amazon Appstore will reduce developer revenue cut from 30% to 20% and give 10% in Free AWS Credit I feel like this title is amazingly hard to read for many reasons all working against us at the same time! ‘developer revenue cut’ really means it’s Amazon’s part that’s reducing, not the developer’s. And they’re reducing the ‘cut’ as in the proportion, not reducing some other previous cut they made to revenue. ‘Amazon reduces App Store fee from 30% to 20% and also gives 10% in AWS credit’ is I think what they mean, and is the opposite of almost every way I could find to read their title.
- pbreit 5y agoTotally! In fact, developer share is increasing from 70% to 90% (with 10% being paid in AWS credits).
- thih9 5y agoThat seems a dangerous way of wording this. The market value of AWS credits is less than the equal amount in regular currency (so: 10% in AWS credits is less than 10% of the revenue). The developer share is increasing to 80% (with bonus AWS credits). Also: > You may not sell, license, rent, or otherwise transfer Promotional Credit. Promotional Credit may be applied only to your own AWS account. Promotional Credit has no intrinsic value, is not redeemable for cash, has no cash value, is nonrefundable, and serves merely as a means to provide an incentive to use our Services. Promotional Credit may not be purchased for cash, and we and our affiliates do not sell Promotional Credit. Source: https://aws.amazon.com/awscredits/ https://aws.amazon.com/awscredits/ And: > The AWS promotional credits can be used for 12 months from the date they were granted. Source: https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/appstore/post/93e89be7-1611-4764-8f97-f4eef0a7c0e0/coming-soon-amazon-appstore-small-business-accelerator-program https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/appstore/post/93e89be7-16...
- munk-a 5y agoWhile I definitely agree that saying it's upping the take home from 70% to 90% would be misleading - in a fair number of cases that 10% credit will be pretty easy to convert to direct value. It is certainly more valuable than, say, 10% of earnings being spendable on Amazon Basic items - they're not quite trying to pull a company store trick here and the fact that 80% of revenue is take-home sales already puts a decent chunk above Apple.
- aeturnum 5y agoThis has real "company scrip" vibes that I am not crazy about. I'm sure it will be good in the short term for companies that are already using a lot of AWS services and have a lot of sales on the Amazon app store[1], but long term doubling down on Amazon's offerings seems risky. I wonder if the solution, instead of breaking up amazon et. al., is to subsidize small companies' spend in the space in a way that effectively equalizes subsidies. These pricing strategies matter the most when you are small and dealing with a lot of cashflow problems and there's a real risk that you choose the provider you can afford and then get stuck. [1] does anyone have a lot of sales on the amazon app store....?
- _jal 5y agoIf the Amazon Bux are transferrable, it is less of a problem. If they aren't, well, yeah, they're crack coupons.
- entangledqubit 5y agoIsn't any compute more-or-less transferable (presumably at less than AWS's dollar cost) if you take it and mine some currency with it? I assume there's something out there that effectively buy spares cycles if you install a client. Or resell S3 space. (And yes, this may be potentially dangerous to your AWS account reputation.)
- tshaddox 5y agoSure, but it’s almost certainly going to be exchangeable for a very small portion of its face value.
- Verdex 5y agoThis is actually something that I'm hoping that eventually homomorphic encryption would enable. Right now it's kind of a bad idea to buy leased out computation time from arbitrary sources. "Hey, I have all these AWS credits and I want to recoup the value of them, so I'll give you a 10% discount on compute time. Uh oh, it turns out I'm also a competitor for your protein folding endeavor, so I'll be analyzing your inputs to steal your secrets and then returning faulting outputs." I suppose you could just demand admin access to their AWS account and lock them out for the duration of your lease, but that's just as bad idea for them as the opposite is for you. If we had efficient homomorphic encryption, then we could just sell so many operations. Then someone looking to lease second hand computation could just put a counter in the output to make sure they're actually running the full amount and bingo cryptographically certain results.
- Ancapistani 5y agoThat’s… nuts. It increases developer revenue by ~15%, and adds an AWS credit for another ~15% on top of that. I’ve never really felt the urge to develop a public-facing app on my own, but I’m going to have to give it some serious thought now. Developing an Android app through contract labor and distributing it via Amazon’s App Store could potentially end up bootstrapping another line of business by providing AWS infrastructure. Now, if Amazon comes out with a viable competitor for Oculus and quickly expands into AR…
- IfOnlyYouKnew 5y agoThey are doing this because the platform is not attractive enough for developers. Otherwise, they wouldn't be doing this. 70% of something easily beasts 90% of almost nothing, ever day.
- mypalmike 5y agoI think you replied to a sarcastic comment. But honestly I'm not sure.
- GrinningFool 5y agoI don't think it was sarcastic. When BlackBerry was adding incentives to get developers to build for their new platform, their app store got flooded with minimum-qualifying-effort crap. I'd expect something similar here, if people think it'll pay off.
- ohyeshedid 5y agoYou don't have to expect, Amazon's app store is filled with shovelware already. I'm wondering what the magic in accounting is doing with this incentive structure.
- foobarbazetc 5y agoAhhh the company store.
- dannyw 5y agoThis is a cute offer, I like it. It's clear that app store costs have been going down for small developers, which is a really nice thing to see. This is only happening thanks to regulatory attention. It would be nice if more preferable terms can still be had for medium sized companies, who are the biggest competitive to the mega caps. I'm talking about maybe <$100M of revenue per year, 20% would be nice. <$1 million: 15% (or 10% if using same platform) $1 - $100 million: 20% >$100 million: 30%.
- tediousdemise 5y agoYour move, Apple.
- shagie 5y agoFrom the article: > Apple announced last year that it will reduce its App Store’s developer revenue cut from 30% to 15% for developers that earn less than $1 million in revenue per year. This change went into effect at the start of 2021. Earlier this year, Google announced that it too will reduce the Play Store’s cut form 30% to 15%, but only for the first $1 million in annual revenu earned by all developers. That change will go into effect on July 1st. > This change by the Amazon Appstore brings its revenue share more closely in line with the new policies of Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store. ...
- cwkoss 5y agoFor developers who don't want to use AWS Credit for normal business operations, has anyone figured what sort of crypto mining on AWS has the highest ROI? Seems like you could convert AWS credit to crypto to 'cash it out'. Do you get 10% of the face value of the credits or more or less?
- lallysingh 5y agoMy guess is spot instances, I dunno if you can get them with gpus attached. EDIT: yes you can: https://bash-prompt.net/guides/aws-gpu-spot/ https://bash-prompt.net/guides/aws-gpu-spot/
- speedgoose 5y agoJoke aside, you really do not care about the environment if consider crypto mining on AWS.
- bobsmooth 5y agoI would imagine mining in a datacenter is more efficient than mining on a desktop.
- deathanatos 5y agoPerhaps not, but hasn't Amazon here basically lined up the incentives to make it the most logical thing for someone to do? A person in this scenario is receiving AWS credit they don't want, AWS won't offer a market for, so they're exchanging? arbitraging? it into some cryptocurrency. (And from there, probably to cash.)
- cwkoss 5y agoSomeone should make an AWSWS webservice where you can get paid to run others' instances on your account to monetize credits - would probably be a lot more efficient. Would be interesting to see where the market prices these credits.
- knuthsat 5y agoThis is too b&w. Does a meat eater not care about the environment or the animals? Mining crypto does not mean you do not care about the environment. Heck, we all live in 1st world cities that are giant wastes of energy, we spend massive amounts of energy traveling.
- DoctorOW 5y agoIt's amazing to me that all the comments here are about Apple when the much larger Google Play store also has a Google cloud offering that competes with AWS. If Google implemented something similar to this they could score big customers who have an app on both Apple/Google stores.
- CobrastanJorji 5y agoIf I had to guess why that doesn't exist, I'd guess that Google is scared of anything that smells like abusing monopoly power given all of the government interest in them over the last couple of years. Of course, big corporations are weird. I could just be overthinking it and it's just that the cloud folks and the play store folks don't talk to each other.
- toomuchredbull 5y agoThe Amazon what now? I didn't even know this was a thing. If anything they probably did it to atttract developers to a non-successful platform.
- ineedasername 5y agoThey sell a ton of kindle fires. Their app store doesn't have the selection of iOS or Android, but it's got a significant # of apps that average consumers might consider deal-breakers. In particular, as a cheap iPad alternative for kids, they have plenty of games.
- the_reformation 5y agoI wonder if this is the way Apple and Google will eventually retreat from their 30%* cut, by using their app store chokepoint to nudge developers to their platform. Seems like a worse monopolistic practice than the 30% cut to me. For Google, that'd obviously be GCP discount. For Apple, less obvious. Pushing iCloud storage? Apple Music? They've already forced every app to support Apple Pay and Sign In with Apple, so they likely don't even need the carrot. *yes I know its not 30% anymore for some/most usecases.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- otrahuevada 5y agoWhy is charging a flat fee never an option? Just take $200 and let me do my thing. Taking any % of my income on the regular as a kind of existence tax is detrimental for the ecosystem.
- Yeroc 5y agoThere are incremental costs involved in bandwidth, if nothing else, to actually distribute your application so it makes sense it's not a simple flat fee.
- otrahuevada 5y agoI've actually never looked at what the bandwidth and storage costs for my apps could be. But also, they could easily be taken out of the equation by letting me pay for that separately? Inclusion in the mandatory single point of failure that is the app stores _by itself_ should not demand a hefty, ongoing tax
- CodesInChaos 5y ago1. Some of their costs scale with the number of purchases or revenue made through the shop (traffic, support, payment processing fees) 2. Fixed costs, like development effort, need to be distributed across their customers. Fixed fees will be negligible for big customers and unaffordable for small customers. 3. They're gatekeepers for these devices. If you want your app on a device they can control you need to pay their fees. So as long as the fees are not big enough to deter a developer from publishing their app for that device, they can charge whatever they want. I think revenue sharing is the best pricing model for an app store, but without abusing the gatekeeper status the fees would likely be significantly lower.
- ramesh1994 5y agoWhile I do agree with what you've said, I think they should be able to price these into a bill that they can send the app developers monthly. They have shown competency in running the pricing on AWS to such great margins and few people seem to complain about pricing. Perhaps it is a combination of the sentiment that they are owed a percentage of your income and it being such a large number (20-30%) frustrates the developers.
- stefan_ 5y agoHaha, wake me when they start paying developers to publish on the Amazon Appstore. Remember, this is for the de-Google-ified Android devices Amazon sells. They don't have Google services so chances are your apps will need major refactoring, and then you are stuck supporting two ecosystems all the time that are subtly different and broken (Amazon tries to emulate some Google services) while the Google side keeps tightening the noose around your neck that are the Google services. And all that, to sell on an app store for devices that are the cheapest crap imaginable and attract a crowd that is about the opposite of what you would want when charging money for apps.
- Black101 5y agowas there a lawsuit in the rear view mirror?
- Apocryphon 5y agoGreat reminder that Android manages to have a third party app store or two run by giant companies (there's a Samsung one as well I believe) and it doesn't water down the Google Play Store or lead to important exclusive apps being restricted to those stores. A lessons for those who believe Apple opening up their apps would pose a threat to the App Store.
- 63 5y agoWhat's interesting to me about it as a consumer is that I actually find the highest quality apps in a third party app store (fdroid). It's not because of exclusive deals or anything, it's just because the Play Store promotes crap full of ads while fdroid intentionally does the opposite.
- grouphugs 5y agothey don't deserve employees
- user3939382 5y agoThe title has already been amended once and now reads “ Amazon Appstore will reduce its developer revenue cut” which is an improvement on the original, but it should say “Amazon Appstore will reduce its cut of developer revenue” As it is, it’s still unclear whose cut is being reduced.
- NicoJuicy 5y agoWho earns 1 million in Amazon's appstore? Is anyone using it? Kindle users perhaps?
- SLWW 5y agoI love how different minds interpret things. I read the title and understood it immediately. I then second-guessed myself when i read the comments thinking I had got it wrong. Although i hadn't. Maybe the writer and I have this in common; my sin is ambiguous titles also; i feel for you friend.