Amazon follows suit, reducing its app store cut for small developers

[Shawn Knight]

What just happened? Amazon has announced a new program designed to help small developers get their feet under them. It follows in the footsteps of companies like Epic, Apple and Google, which have rolled out similar dev-friendly revenue split programs in recent memory.

Under the Amazon Appstore Small Business Accelerator Program, developers who earned less than $1 million in revenue in the previous calendar year will qualify for an 80/20 revenue share by default. This means that Amazon will lower its cut from 30 percent to 20 percent, but that’s not all.

Amazon further noted that it will provide AWS promotional credits in an amount equivalent to 10 percent of revenue and will be valid for up to 12 months from the date they were issued.

Fully utilizing both offers, one could say that Amazon is effectively lowering its cut down to just 10 percent overall.

The usefulness of those AWS credits will vary depending on the developer, although Amazon cited recent survey data claiming 94 percent of devs use cloud services during the app development process.

Epic got the ball rolling in this category in late 2018 with the launch of its Epic Games Store and a developer-friendly revenue split that let devs keep 88 percent of their earnings. Apple in 2020 trimmed App Store commission fees to 15 percent for devs that make less than $1 million annually. Google followed suit a few months later, announcing it would be cutting fees in half (from 30 percent to 15 percent) for the first $1 million in revenue earned by devs each year.

Amazon’s new program starts in the fourth quarter of this year, we’re told.

Image credit dennizn, Michael Vi

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[Dimitriid]

You know what would be even better than 10% better cut and 10% in moon dollar credits?

A flat 20% better cut for all those smaller devs earning under 1 million. Trying to tie in the smaller devs into signing into AWS it's just Amazon taking the PR of this supposedly selfless move and try to cram in a bit of self interest self promotion of their services.

Ideally I should be able to create an App that lives on Amazon's store front but uses Azure as the cloud service provider of choice if I wanted to, except now there's an extra 10% that insidiously just makes AWS feel much better if I get up to almost 100,000 USD of discount on it.

This is something Microsoft should probably sue over, unless of course they're doing something similar themselves which probably they are doing or plan on doing: Do an app for Microsoft Store! And get up to 10% of your revenue back in credits in *our* moon dollar currency for Azure!

These corporations just can't help themselves: they cannot allow themselves to just do something altruistic to help out smaller devs, they just *have to* turn it into disgusting self promotion of cloud services.

 

[psycros]

You know what would be even better than 10% better cut and 10% in moon dollar credits?

A flat 20% better cut for all those smaller devs earning under 1 million. Trying to tie in the smaller devs into signing into AWS it's just Amazon taking the PR of this supposedly selfless move and try to cram in a bit of self interest self promotion of their services.

Ideally I should be able to create an App that lives on Amazon's store front but uses Azure as the cloud service provider of choice if I wanted to, except now there's an extra 10% that insidiously just makes AWS feel much better if I get up to almost 100,000 USD of discount on it.

This is something Microsoft should probably sue over, unless of course they're doing something similar themselves which probably they are doing or plan on doing: Do an app for Microsoft Store! And get up to 10% of your revenue back in credits in *our* moon dollar currency for Azure!

These corporations just can't help themselves: they cannot allow themselves to just do something altruistic to help out smaller devs, they just *have to* turn it into disgusting self promotion of cloud services.

And that's why sideloading will eventually go mainstream. A single smart coder could open the floodgates by putting out a dead-simple jailbreak. Right now the great hope among devs are web apps that the app store owners can't legally block access to, but we all know that's years from bearing fruit because of performance issues.