Amazon Underground has three times as many Android apps than ever before

amazon-underground

Amazon has been playing around with a pretty interesting business model lately, and their use of it involving Android apps has seen a 300% growth since its inception.

The idea is simple. Creators should get paid in proportion to the amount of time a consumer engages the creative content. Amazon first came up with the idea when crowds of writers with cartoonish dollar signs in their eyes flooded the Kindle self-publication platform with an unrelenting tide of werewolf erotica.

For years, Amazon had been trying to establish itself as a serious publishing operation, but eliminating the traditional gatekeepers of publication had some unexpected results. Suddenly, the professional writers they wanted to showcase had to dog paddle in a sea of poorly written lupine lust hocked at $2.99 a pop. Something had to be done.

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Amazon solved their problem by introducing Kindle Unlimited, an intriguing system that pays a writer for how many pages a reader reads of their book. The werewolf erotica economy, which banked on titillated readers forking over cash in exchange for a few hastily read pages of drivel, suddenly collapsed. Now the people who began profiting were creators who produced well-crafted, engaging writing that found and maintained an audience.

As an encore, Amazon turned their attention to their Free App of the Day program, a system that provided a different paid app free of charge each day to Amazon device owners. They decided to replace Free App of the Day with Amazon Underground, a system very similar to Kindle Unlimited that pays developers based on the number of minutes users stay engaged with the app. Amazon Underground launched with a selection of paid Android apps (which Amazon device owners can access for free), and as of this week the size of that selection has tripled.

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Hypothetically with this model in place, developers who create engaging and useful apps will be paid well by Amazon, and the developers who create whatever the app-equivalent of werewolf erotica is will get left out in the cold.

It’s such a new payment model that there’s no guarantee how well this will play out for developers. However, if you’ve got an Amazon device and the Amazon Underground store, it’s a win-win for you. More paid Android apps than ever are available to you for free. Might as well check ‘em out.

By | 2015-11-11T01:00:08+00:00 November 11th, 2015|Android Related, Just the Tablets|0 Comments

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