Amazon takes stupid crown from Apple in the battle to piss off app devs
Via Daring Fireball, Amazon App Store: Rotten To The Core:
That’s right, Amazon gave away 101,491 copies of our app! At this point, we had a few seconds of excitement as well, had we mis-read the email and really earned $54,800 in one day? We would have done if our public agreement was in place, but we can now confirm that thanks to Amazon’s secret back-door deals, we made $0 on that day. That’s right, over 100,000 apps given away, $0 made. Did the exposure count for much in the days afterwards? That’s also a big no, the day after saw a blip in sales, followed by things going back to exactly where we started, selling a few apps a day. In fact Amazon decided to rub salt in the wounds a little further by discounting our app to 99 cents for a few days after the free promotion.
Classy. Apple has got a lot of things wrong with its App Store and how it treats devs, but it never pulls shit like this.
Outrageous. Simply outrageous. I do believe that only developers -preferably indie developers- can run such app stores in a fair or at least fairer way. Steam is almost there…