Amazon Appstore more lucrative for many devs than Android Market
Investment in Amazon Appstore is paying off in a big way for many top developers, a good chunk of whom are pulling in more money for their apps on Amazon than through Google's Android Market.
Context & Ripple Effects
The verdict is a sharp reversal from mid-2011, when GigaOM found Amazon's Android Appstore 'not so amazing' and questioned whether the curated storefront justified its friction for developers. Seven months later, many top developers report pulling in more money per app on Amazon than through Google's Android Market — a confirmed claim that landed with unusual breadth, picked up the same day by TechCrunch, GeekWire, and InfoWorld.
What changed is the monetization math: Amazon's smaller but paying audience, merchandising muscle, and free-app-a-day promotion are converting better than Android Market's far larger install base. For Google, the story lands amid a stretch of competitive pressure across its portfolio, from Latitude Leaderboards challenging Foursquare to Chromebook hardware criticism.
First-order effects
- Top developers now have a data-backed reason to prioritize Amazon Appstore launches and feature placements over treating it as an afterthought to Android Market distribution.
- Amazon gains leverage in developer negotiations: a storefront once dismissed as marginal can credibly pitch itself as the higher-revenue channel for paid and freemium apps.
Second-order effects
- Google faces pressure to fix Android Market's discovery and payment conversion, since losing top titles' launch momentum to a rival Android storefront undermines the platform's own catalog.
- Other would-be Android storefronts — carriers and OEMs weighing their own app shops — get proof that a curated, retail-oriented model can out-monetize the default market even at smaller scale.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Android app economics fragment by storefront rather than by operating system, with developers allocating launches by revenue-per-user instead of raw device reach — a dynamic that favors retailers with billing relationships over pure platform owners.
The trend: App-store competition on Android is shifting from install reach to revenue quality, letting a curated retailer like Amazon outbid the platform owner for developer attention.