4 lessons from Amazon’s Android Appstore

Developer Shifty Jelly offers a frustrated but interesting take on Amazon’s Android Appstore (via Techmeme). Here’s what I took away:

1. Amazon’s Appstore can be tiny. Shifty Jelly only sold four copies of its app over a three-day span in June. That’s not enough to sustain any business.
2. Amazon’s Appstore can be huge. On the day Shifty Jelly’s app was promoted as a “free app of the day,” 101,000 people downloaded the app. That’s a great day in any app store.
3. It is a bad business decision to take on 100,000 new unpaid customers unless you can monetize them later, whether through freemium features, in-app purchases, advertising, subscriptions, etc. Especially if they are creating additional server- or infrastructure-related costs.
4. Amazon still has a lot to learn about running an app store. But so does everyone else.

Also: When market research predicts fantasy