Amazon Underground

» see amazon.com/underground as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

amazon underground was launched on 26 august 2015 as a rival app-store model that paid developers by user-minute instead of by download or by in-app purchase. the pitch was called "actually free": every app in the store was free to install, free to use, and had no in-app purchases behind paywalls. amazon paid the developer $0.002 for every minute a user spent inside the app.

the target market was parents. kids were burning through credit cards on candy crush lives and freemium currency, and amazon was betting a fixed hourly payout would let developers stop building for the whales-and-guilt model. the launch marketing said the underground catalog was worth about $10,000 if bought conventionally. big-name apps included office suite pro, monument valley, frozen free fall.

the model did not scale. small developers who signed up saw revenue per user-minute at rates that only paid off if their app was very sticky, which most were not. big developers who were already making money on iap did not want to swap that for a per-minute check from amazon. by april 2017 amazon told developers that new-app submissions would close on 31 may 2017. existing apps kept running on fire tablets for another two and a half years, then everything went dark at the end of 2019.

underground was distributed via a separate apk (amazon appstore was not on the google play store), so you had to sideload it on any non-fire android device. i was on turkish android at the time, running samsung galaxy hardware with google play as the main store. amazon underground never surfaced for me because the fire tablet was a us-market product that did not really move in turkey, and sideloading an amazon appstore apk to get "actually free" versions of games i was not playing anyway was not a strong reason to do it.

~ the dossier ~

~ the actually-free trick ~

the $0.002 per minute figure was the whole product in a sentence. if a user played your game for an hour, amazon paid you 12 cents. if they played 30 hours, $3.60. the math worked for a subset of developers with very engaged audiences and simple monetization, and did not work for anyone whose economy depended on iap conversion of high-value users. amazon was betting that the number of parents willing to trade the "no purchase button anywhere" guarantee for a slight ux compromise would be big enough to fund the model. the number turned out to be too small.

~ the fire-tablet corner ~

on fire tablets underground was pre-installed as the default app-discovery surface for a stretch of 2016 and 2017. it was one of the reasons fire tablets stayed cheap and gift-friendly: the "free games included" pitch made a $50 tablet feel more valuable than the hardware justified. when underground was retired, fire tablets shifted back to the standard amazon appstore, which still runs today. the difference is that the appstore charges normally, and no one gets paid by the minute anymore.

~ what it left ~

the per-minute payment model did not die entirely. hulu, spotify and netflix all pay content creators on a play-count or listen-count basis that is conceptually similar. apple arcade launched in september 2019 with a fixed-monthly-price bundle and a share-of-play formula for developer payouts, which is a cleaner version of the underground bet. underground itself is remembered mostly as an odd branch of amazon's 2013-2017 fire strategy that never converted the parent audience it was designed for.

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