Jason Kincaid on TechChrunch:
The biggest departure from the mobile app stores we’ve grown accustomed to involves pricing. Unlike Apple’s App Store and Android Market, where developers can set their price to whatever they’d like, Amazon retains full control over how it wants to price your application. The setup is a bit confusing: upon submitting your application, you can set a ‘List Price’, which is the price you’d normally sell it at. Amazon will use a variety of market factors to determine what price it wants to use, and you get a 70% cut of the proceeds of each sale (which is the industry standard). In the event that Amazon steeply discounts your application, or offers it for free, you’re guaranteed to get 20% of the List Price.
Sounds like centralized, corporate management to me. Obviously Amazon wants their Android App Store to be hugely successful and so they’re acting as if they know what’s best for each developer’s app. And maybe they do.
But perhaps not. As Dan Frommer writes on Business Insider:
In theory, Amazon will be able to use whatever sales algorithms it has to generate the most possible revenue.
So perhaps the price of an app in Amazon’s Android App Store will be dynamic, with app prices fluctuating up or down on a case-by-case basis based on popularity, who it is browsing the store, etc.
And surely Amazon has set some sort of guideline to prohibit a developer from suggesting an outrageous ‘List Price’. I mean, if the developer is guaranteed at least 20% of the price they suggest upon submission of their app, then why not suggest $1,000,000?