This is Android - what about apps that run mostly in the background ? A music player, fitness tracker, activity tracker? What about apps that run continuously, like a launcher ?
Amazon Underground
61–70 of 139 posts
Re: Amazon Underground
#62Took me a minute to find out what "actually free" means: https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/underground/do... "Interstitial Advertisements When a user launches an Amazon Underground app for the first time, a welcome message in the form of an interstitial ad plays. In subsequent times that a user either launches or resumes the app, paid interstitial ads will also sometimes play." Interesting. So amazon deal…
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.
[deleted]
Re: Amazon Underground
#63Earlier 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.
Of course there are ads. Amazon never implied that there wouldn't be. This isn't Amazon trying to be sneaky. The opening lines say that everything is free and developers get paid according to use. How did you expect that would happen? It has to be subsidized in some way, and in the context of an app store that means ads. When you download an app in the app store it says "free" not "free with ads" because you don't ha…
Oh, I definitely expected ads, I'm not surprised at all, and I don't think Amazon is being excessively sneaky (though it would be nice if this information was more prominent on their developer pages). I'm mostly disappointed in the authors of the multiple news articles I saw about this [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] for parroting Amazon's "Free Apps" PR without doing enough research to find out about the ads Amazon is using to pay for the deal.
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/26/amazon-underground-is-an-an...
[2] http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/08/amazons-new-games-and-...
[3] http://www.engadget.com/2015/08/26/amazon-underground-free-a...
[4] http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2490149,00.asp
[5] http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/26/9210071/amazon-underground...
Re: Amazon Underground
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course there are ads. Amazon never implied that there wouldn't be. This isn't Amazon trying to be sneaky. The opening lines say that everything is free and developers get paid according to use. How did you expect that would happen? It has to be subsidized in some way, and in the context of an app store that means ads. When you download an app in the app store it says "free" not "free with ads" because you don't ha…
Not mentioning ads at all in an announcement about a service that adds ads to apps to replace the fee isn't being sneaky?
I don't think so. Facebook doesn't say "This is free with ads!" It says it's free to use. It just so happens that ads are byproduct of using it.
It's pretty obvious in the documentation and on every page except for the original product announcement that it's ad supported, but I don't expect Amazon to use a bunch of their 200-word product announcement to justify why there are ads.
The important point is that it's free, meaning I don't pay for it with dollars. When is the last time a free product shouted "BTW it's only free because of ads?!" I felt like it was implied, and I don't expect marketing to be like, "And here are the tradeoffs you have to make and that you might not like." When you download an app from the current app store (Apple or Google) it says "Free," even if the app includes ads.
I don't feel slighted one bit.
Re: Amazon Underground
#65Downloading now and it is coming from Akamai. Surprised it isn't coming from AWS.
Having just left a career at Amazon that spanned nearly 5 years, I can say with experience that it is not so uncommon to find this happening. I worked at a subsidiary, and we had to bill Amazon Corporate for our own AWS use. Being a media-oriented company, this particular subsidiary is sometimes a bit of an expensive AWS customer.
As a result, my former department, to this day, uses a Hightail (formerly, YouSendIt) dropbox as its only means by which customers can deliver files to the support and quality assurance teams.
Re: Amazon Underground
#66To install, it requires a rear-facing camera for some odd reason.
Re: Amazon Underground
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course there are ads. Amazon never implied that there wouldn't be. This isn't Amazon trying to be sneaky. The opening lines say that everything is free and developers get paid according to use. How did you expect that would happen? It has to be subsidized in some way, and in the context of an app store that means ads. When you download an app in the app store it says "free" not "free with ads" because you don't ha…
Oh, I definitely expected ads, I'm not surprised at all, and I don't think Amazon is being excessively sneaky (though it would be nice if this information was more prominent on their developer pages). I'm mostly disappointed in the authors of the multiple news articles I saw about this [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] for parroting Amazon's "Free Apps" PR without doing enough research to find out about the ads Amazon is using to…
Wow. Those links are pretty damning.
Ars mentioned there are ads in the Underground app itself, but didn't mention anything about ads being added to apps. Techcrunch only mentions ads in explaining how previous app revenue models used banner ads. The Verge doesn't mention ads at all. Embarrassing.
Re: Amazon Underground
#68They reaaallly want the Amazon app store to happen on Android, don't they? We'll see if free content will be enough to get non-tech-savvy users to go through the trouble of installing an .apk file.
I dont know but thats how i want my app store to be so im installing it.
I'm genuinely curious about your stance. You would prefer more ads to paying? I thought more tech-savvy people prefer to pay small amounts for apps, so that they are the customer.
Re: Amazon Underground
#69They reaaallly want the Amazon app store to happen on Android, don't they? We'll see if free content will be enough to get non-tech-savvy users to go through the trouble of installing an .apk file.
I dont know but thats how i want my app store to be so im installing it.
... what is how you want your app store to be?
The thing is a god damn nightmare to install, even for someone who is really trying and is savvy. So many god damn redirect loops.
Re: Amazon Underground
#70I 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 work. Some bug about if the disk is full wifi fails to work. There's just about no way to get the videos off the device, and no way for kids to do it. Download 2 movies? The wifi stops working. Install an app? 80% of the time, it never shows up in the menu.
The entire experience was stunningly bad. Amazon's entire Android device category is garbage. People complain about the extensions to Android by Samsung, etc, but honestly at least those other companies don't fundamentally ruin the device.