He knew it was a bad deal, and that it didn't seem to work with their business model, but he did it any way (as pressured by other people in the company, which he admits). There's absolutely no surprises for them in this post, just regret. Sure, they didn't "realize" that it would garner so many free downloads, but that was always a chance, and in any case could have been quickly determined before agreeing by contacting other developers of featured apps.<p>The one piece of legitimate news here is that app of the day developers aren't being compensated at all, but that comes no where near justifying "rotten to the core", especially as they're all well aware of the terms when they agree to them.<p>He seems overly concerned with people who download the app just because they think it will trigger some micropayment to the developer, but that can't be a large number of people (developers paying attention to the launch terms of the market) and in any case are very unlikely to make up much of his support burden.
That's absolutely incredible.
It's also the first I'd heard about difficulties with the Amazon App Store (which, if I remember correctly, was opened to great fanfare about how developer & user friendly it was)<p>It does seem as though Android is an <i>incredibly</i> difficult platform to make money on though.
This site has been littered with complaints (& plenty of iOS-vs-Android posts) about the dev process and lack of buyer activity.<p>I've actually found myself buying more than I otherwise would have, as a result of this sentiment. I want to support Android dev, and my credit card seems like the most logical way to do that.<p>Funnily enough, I've never even considered the Amazon market. I wonder what type of people do...
I imagine if Amazon had to reimburse developers for any non-zero amount this would be bad for business. It sounds like they're in this "free app a day" thing for the long-haul.<p>It also seems to me that what the developer is getting for this is a free day of advertising. So if someone tries your app who normally wouldn't have because it's prominently displayed on the top of the screen and they like it they might buy the next version or other apps from you.