Marco.org

This is a story about developers making a bad business choice, and they should take most of the blame. But Amazon’s Appstore sounds awful.

These three points from the article stood out the most to me:

• Amazon gets to set the price of your app to whatever they want, without any input from you, or even the chance to reject their price.
• Amazon re-writes your description, and in ours they even made up things like ‘add up to 100 podcasts’. No idea where on earth they got that number from.
• You can’t remove apps from their store! You have to ask them for permission via an email.

I can’t imagine giving up that much control. Whoever’s running Amazon’s Appstore either doesn’t understand developers or has no respect for them.

This is a signficantly different approach than Apple’s. Despite the approval process (which I like overall), Apple respects developers’ pride in their work and their desire for control over it.

There will always be something to fill Amazon’s inventory, but we’ll probably see very few high-quality or highly functional apps. As we’re seeing in the rest of the Android world, that can cause serious problems with customer satisfaction, customer retention, and return rates.