Did anyone look at the list of permissions? Amazon isn't paying developers for interstital ads ... it's paying them to have an excuse to track everything on your phone:
http://www.amazon.com/Amazon-com-Amazon-Underground/dp/B004G...
Amazon Underground
111–120 of 139 posts
Re: Amazon Underground
#112I bought my daughters Kindle Fire's for Christmas. It doesn't have the Google Play store. 99.99% of the apps available, either free or even paid, are cookie cutter, mass produced, generic garbage. Almost all the free apps were complete junk. Besides that, the Kindle Fire is a fundamentally useless device for kids. The kid mode was so buggy as to be useless. Take more than a few minutes of video and the wifi won't wor…
Did you contact CS? Amazon's customer support is amazingly good and would take care of that for you ASAP.
Customer support will be happy to refund your purchase, but there's nothing they can do about a fundamentally bad product
Re: Amazon Underground
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's free if I suffer no cost. Do you bait and then throw up some monstrosity of an ad in a forced attempt to brainwash me? Or, maybe you don't bait and just force me to watch the ad. Either way, I suffer some cost, in the very least in having to detect the attempt and retreat from your page. To act like that is not a real cost is...baffling.
It's not that that's not a real cost. Is that you don't include intangible things such as time and emotions when determining if something is free, by any expected usage of the word.
Hold on. My account balances are represented in a purely digital form. Almost all have no real physical record, at least not in sufficient detail or accessibility to be comparable to the digital form (in most cases it would probably be impossible to recover from a complete loss of the digital form). Most people here who use traditional banks and credit cards are probably in a similar situation. You are telling me that these numbers ($$$) that exist only as a pure digital artifact in some bank's database is a 'tangible thing'? But the time spent on the horrific and unsolicited intimate experience that you put me through with your ad is 'intangible'?
wut?
Re: Amazon Underground
#114Seems like Amazon are trying to replicate WeChat by creating a platform that people don't leave to use apps. By owning this 'ecosystem', Amazon can (a) collect all sorts of data from what apps people use, how long they use them, when they use them, etc. and (b) can provide ads (as Sigmar states) that are very targetted.
Smart play. It's definitely disruptive...
Re: Amazon Underground
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Finally, someone figures out the real reason Amazon is doing this. Thank you for doing the job all the journalists reporting on the press release failed to do.
No, the real reason Amazon is doing this is that they want to get the Amazon App Store onto Google and carrier branded Android phones. It's a fight for survival and relevance against Google Play.
I think there should be an "app store" selection dialog, just as there should be a "default browser" selection dialog (ruled by the EU).
Re: Amazon Underground
#116So what's the direct download url for Amazon_App.apk ?
Oh here we go: https://amazon.com/gp/mas/get/android?dl=1
Take off the ?dl for a better splash page http://amazon.com/gp/mas/get/android
Re: Amazon Underground
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
iOS doesn't allow apps to be installed outside a few apple controlled processes without a JailBreak. I don't think Amazon would want to launch a product dependent on JailBreaking. Unless Apple is forced to provide an API for alternative app stores, I can't see this ever being allowed. Unless of course apple rips off the idea and does it themselves.
Could Apple take legal action if Amazon were to try that? (hypothetically of course)
My understanding is not directly, however it could be argued that they were encouraging the end user to break the EULA on the product and thus interfering in the contract between apple and the end user. Different legal systems would view it differently.
On the other hand, apple could just throw more money into securing the phones from jailbreaking and end the business model much easier.
Re: Amazon Underground
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
This actively discriminates against people who find certain typefaces difficult, those using assistive technologies, and those using mobile devices. It's also not machine-friendly, so search engines can't index it and Ctrl+F doesn't work. There's probably plenty of other reasons people can give for why plaintext is better. I wish people wouldn't do this. It's not even necessary to get the desired effect. CSS has had…
I am very sympathetic to your position, but CSS support in email clients is still surprisingly primitive (e.g. MS using Word's html rendering engine in Outlook). If you look at the source of most html emails that you get, they will be using tables for layout...
The rotation is really the only thing I'd expect problems with. Surely Word supports background-image: ?
Re: Amazon Underground
#119From the author's pov, it's an interesting proposition. Take sorcery for example: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dba... I bought this and played it for about an hour to completion. For my hour, I'd have made them $0.12. Instead, I paid $4.64. So for them to get to the same profit using this model, they'd have to attract $4.62/$0.12 = 38 times more users. i.e instead of having 1000+ downloads…
There are also a lot of people out there who would not be willing to pay the $4.64 dollars. By using this model, developers can get both the people who want to buy it through the store and people who don't want to spend any money to play it, which might end up being more total profit.
Re: Amazon Underground
#120Did anyone look at the list of permissions? Amazon isn't paying developers for interstital ads ... it's paying them to have an excuse to track everything on your phone: http://www.amazon.com/Amazon-com-Amazon-Underground/dp/B004G...
My word that's a massive list. That's insane.