Amazon’s “free app of the day” is offered on the developer’s expenses

Amazon Appstore is one good alternative to Google’s Android Market. It offers both free and paid apps. But everyday it make one more offer through its free app of the day deal, in which it sells its one paid apps for free for whole day. A large number of downloader’s take benefit of it. But are the developers also getting the equal benefit out of this offer?

According to the Shifty Jelly they are not. The reason being the offer Amazon gives to the apps developer is a little weird. As what happened with the Shifty Jelly is that Amazon promised that it will be paid 20 percent of the money on the sale of each copy of the application. But later Amazon turned up from its word and said that it is still a better deal for Jelly that it may not make any money from this app for a day, but at least her app is getting popularity.

So, the point here is, are we downloading these app on the cost of the developers personal expenses. Shifty Jelly has posted its Pocket casts app, which was downloaded by over 100,000 people around the world. So, if the developer would have been paid 20 percent of the money on the sale of per copy then it would have earned around, $54,805.14, which is really a healthy amount.

But Shifty Jelly had no other option left and even besides bearing the financial loss it had to create new server on their own to draw attention of more users. May be the application is getting popularity but are we here to download these apps on developers expenses? This “free app of the day” is really wonderful feature of Amazon Appstore. In free app of the day deal Amazon sell its exclusive apps for free like few months back it sold the Angry Bird Rio. But at least Amazon should not back off from its promise that the developer will be paid 20 percent of the money asked.