Recently, the Amazon Appstore for Android featured Read It Later Pro as the Free App of the Day. The extremely popular and useful application allows users to save what they find on the web to watch and read on any device and at any time – a “DVR for the web,” states The New York Times.

Founded in 2007, the company already boasts 3.5 million users and sees millions of articles saved each week through their very user-friendly and seamless service.

Also, the company “runs the entire Read It Later operation on Amazon Web Services [AWS],” states founder Nate Weiner. “We take advantage of EC2 for our servers, ELB for load balancing, S3 and EBS for storage. We also use Amazon Simple Email Services [SES], which has simplified our e-mail communications and made them more effective.” Although very excited about the Free App of the Day promotion, the Read It Later team expressed some concern over the large number of expected new customers and the impact on their 50K daily e-mail limit through SES.

According to Read It Later CTO and Engineer Matt Koidin, the internal teams at Amazon moved quickly to address a solution for this use case. “We initially thought we would need additional development to work around the e-mail limit… but our account manager was able to coordinate with the AWS team to increase the limit for the day,” Koidin said.

Koidin and team see this as another example of the Amazon Appstore’s ability to provide an advantage through its network of services for developers. “Having Amazon not only run the promotion, but work with the broader Amazon organization (i.e. AWS) to provide some assistance so it didn’t overwhelm us or require additional work, shows they are aligned as a partner to make this a success for everyone involved,” added Koidin.

The team at Read It Later was happy to report that the promotion resulted in “one of our largest days of new user acquisition ever” and “we’ve seen our transaction level sustain at a higher level than prior to the promotion.” They see more exciting opportunities down the road to incorporate additional Amazon services for developers.  When asked if they would run the Free App of the Day promotion again, Koidin replied with a simple, “Absolutely.”

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Recently, we announced a new improvement to the Amazon Appstore Developer Portal:  User Permissions (Developer Portal User Permissions).  This feature allows your organization to assign roles for different responsibilities on your team.  One organization that has fully embraced this tool expansion is game developer DistinctDev, Inc.

DistinctDev, Inc., is a small and energetic development house creating highly-addictive casual game titles – most notably, The Moron Test. 


Recently, DistinctDev Co-Founder and CTO, Steven Malagon, and his brother, Berkeley Malagon – also the President and CEO – took advantage of structuring their organization using the new permissions.  The only rivalry that existed between these two siblings was one that revolved around Developer Portal access: Berkeley, a self-described “data junkie,” was completely reliant on his brother Steven to “get signed in using his personal Amazon account.”  Without global visibility to all the great functionality of the Developer Portal, it became Steven’s role to debrief the team.  Needless to say, the entire team was very excited to receive the announcement for User Permissions.

Steven said, “The setup was super easy, and it literally took me seconds to enter email addresses and send out the invites for assigned roles.” Berkeley Malagon sees this as “a scalable solution as we move forward and grow as a company…adding new users and assigning access.”

The team at DistinctDev also sees the new User Permissions functionality as a great sign for things to come with the Amazon Appstore.  “The improvements really make it even simpler, organizationally, to upload new titles, and it makes us feel like our feedback is really taken seriously,” stated Berkeley.

This is all good news for Amazon customers as well, who have taken a liking to great quality games, like The Moron Test.  The DistinctDev team cannot wait to see what new enhancements are to come and encourage everyone participating in the Amazon Appstore to take advantage of setting up their permissions.  Berkeley said it best, “User Permissions is spot-on.”

Tired of having to give colleagues on your team access to your Amazon Appstore Developer Portal account?  Worried about sharing your Amazon.com password for access to the Portal?  Based on developer feedback, we have released a new functionality that will make managing your account even easier: User Permissions.  We understand the need for each organization to have sets of access levels and visibility to the Portal’s functionality.  Now, you will be able to set these permissions for multiple users of the same Developer Portal account.

If you are the Administrator on the Amazon Appstore Developer Portal for your company’s apps, you will have the unique ability to manage permissions and payment information, and oversee all activities which occur under the users authorized for the Developer Portal account.  The assignable roles under the Administrator include:

• Marketer - Outside of an Administrator - this is the only role that gives users the ability to edit the company profile and content associated with apps (i.e., merchandising and multimedia). Like the Analyst, this role also gives access to earnings reports.
• Developer - Outside of an Administrator - this is the only role that gives users the ability to upload binaries associated with apps.
• Analyst - Outside of an Administrator - this is the only role that gives users the ability to view payment reports. Like the Marketer, this role also gives users access to earnings reports.

While there is only one owner-designated Administrator, there is no limit on the number of additional Administrators or sub-roles.  Only the Administrators can easily see all other users associated with the account.  Have a small team where the person handling submissions also oversees marketing strategy?  No problem, users with Administrator privileges can be assigned to more than one role.

The process for assigning roles is simple.  Once you identify everyone who requires access, go to “User Permissions” and enter their email addresses and we will send an invitation email for them to accept access and their role.  Once everyone has accepted, we make it easy to sort by name and role on the Permissions Page for everyone on the team.

 


Finally, we realize that some users do work for more than one organization.  So, we have added a new Account drop-down menu on the Home Page of the Developer Portal—allowing you to manage multiple organization accounts from the same Amazon.com user login.

There you go - User permissions granted!  Begin setting up your team today.