Amazon Underground and your Android apps.

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Spoonweaver
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Amazon Underground and your Android apps.

Post by Spoonweaver »

So, Amazon has begun a campaign to promote actually free games. Considering that most developers here already have their games released for free, this seems like thing to job onboard. Not only will this likely get all our OHR android games more attention in the amazon app store, it seems you get paid for having a free game under their service.

However, it does require a repackaging of the APK.

And they want the icon to reflect the game's actually free status with their actually free icon overlay.

I believe that's all most of our games would need to change in order to qualify. There might be something else I missed though. I'll link the requirement page below.

https://developer.amazon.com/public/sol ... nderground
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Bob the Hamster
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Post by Bob the Hamster »

I have put two of my games (Don't Eat Soap and Paladin Traducer) on Amazon Underground. They do indeed get noticeably more downloads.

One important catch-- You cannot put free games on Amazon Underground. You are only allowed to upload free versions of games that would otherwise NOT be free.

I had $0.99 price tags on both Don't Eat Soap, and Paladin Traducer, which is why they were eligible.
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Post by RMZ »

Yeah, the Amazon Underground stuff is pretty neat. I've been meaning to do this. When I get Surfasaurus and MTA ready for Steam I'll give it a try too. I find that even when they're set up for the Amazon game systems they still don't get noticed easily enough. I know when I go looking for games on my kindle I go straight to the Underground area (which is where I got both of James' games, Don't Eat Soap is a great casual mobile game).
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Post by Pepsi Ranger »

You may want to keep an eye on the fine print moving forward. This sounds like a great idea, but there was also once upon a time when Kindle Unlimited sounded like a great idea until it gradually became exploitative of authors, progressively less friendly with the pay, and partly responsible for harming the indie publishing market across the board. I hope this isn't another Amazon trick for bringing developers in and locking them into an exclusive downward spiral of increasingly bad quality service. But you all may want to keep an eye on things, just in case.

I like Amazon for the most part, but they can get really territorial with their services and anything that uses them.
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Bob the Hamster
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Post by Bob the Hamster »

It certainly doesnt earn a lot of money

Also, I have been trying to upload a bugfix for the Amazon Underground version of Don't Eat Soap, and something is broken with their review process. It fails everytime saying the icon is wrong, but from what I see the icon is just fine :(
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Post by TMC »

This page is more helpful to understand what this Underground thing is about, once you skip a few pages down: https://developer.amazon.com/public/sol ... rtisements

So you could even submit apps that contain in-app purchases or ads, and Amazon will simply set the costs of all those purchases to $0 (and I assume remove the ads). That's all replaced with ads that play when starting or resuming the game instead.

Unrelated, but one advantage of repackaging with a more recent Android build of the OHR is that the app will no longer require "full internet access", which is something it never actually needed/used.
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