Amazon Underground is a new app for Android phones where customers can access over 1,500 free versions of apps and games that normally cost money to download and play (including unlimited, free in-app items).  Amazon Underground launched in August of 2015 for customers in the US, UK, Germany and France. Starting today, Amazon Underground is available in 16 additional countries and territories including Italy and Spain, opening up new and exciting opportunities for mobile developers to reach an even broader audience.

Amazon Underground customers will find  free versions of popular premium titles like Office Suite Professional 8 and Fruit Ninja and popular titles with in-app purchases like Frozen Free Fall, Star Wars Rebels: Recon Missions, Angry Birds Slingshot Stella, and many more.   Any developer can submit their app, which means more apps and games will be added to Underground all the time.

In Dev Chat – Short Answers to Big Questions, our new video series of short videos created by Amazon Appstore, developers of successful apps and games answer your questions in less than 90 seconds.

In this edition, the team behind NeuroNation explains how their focus on the customer experience has fostered increased user engagement. They also discuss how they monetize globally by adapting their business model to the way their users connect and behave, and how they see Amazon Underground as a unique opportunity to align monetization with their high user engagement.

Today Marmalade announced the launch of the free Marmalade for Amazon SDK. If you are like me, you have thought of half a dozen ideas for apps that would be great in Amazon Underground, where apps are #ActuallyFree for customers and developers get paid for every minute that the app is used. Now, getting those built is a whole lot easier with the launch of the Marmalade for Amazon SDK.

Marmalade is the first cross-platform solution to implement support for Amazon Underground APK management, including single click publishing, to simplify publishing apps to both Underground and the Amazon Appstore. 

You’ve built a great app, and you may have spent a lot of time implementing IAP in your app so you can make a bit of money for your efforts (or better still, make a lot of money from your efforts!).  But perhaps like most developers, maybe 2-10% of your customers actually buy anything. It can get frustrating. Now, with Amazon Underground you have the option to monetize your app and get paid based on how much time users actually spend using your app. All your users.

If you are interested in trying out this new monetization model by submitting an existing IAP-based app, the following is a guide for you!

Amazon Underground represents a new opportunity for developers of premium games that are looking to expand their audience and still monetize well. Ideally when you lower the price of a game or make it free it increases the number of downloads and exposure but usually at the expense of earning money. This is one of the major factors that has made Free 2 Play (F2P) so appealing to developers since you can get a larger audience and focus on converting players into paid customers via in-app purchase (IAP). Unfortunately not every game lends itself to this model.

With Amazon Underground’s monetization approach, Amazon pays you for every minute a customer uses your Amazon Underground app, and customers pay nothing.

In this post we’ll talk about four things you’ll need to do in order to take an existing premium game and submit it into the Amazon Underground program. It’s also a great opportunity to turn non-paying customers into paying ones through deeper engagement and longer play sessions.

The launch of Amazon Underground was front and center this week, and we’ve seen a lot of excitement about apps and games that are #ActuallyFree. Amazon Underground customers will find 100% free versions of popular premium titles like Office Suite Professional 8 and Fruit Ninja and popular titles with in-app purchases like Frozen Free Fall, Star Wars Rebels: Recon Missions, Angry Birds Slingshot Stella, and many more.

Tom’s Guide wanted to see what all the fuss was about, so they tried out the Amazon Underground game Jetpack Joyride, and says “The real magic comes in the form of free in-app purchases” and “There is no limit on the number of in-app purchases you can make, and you can buy items repeatedly, depending on whether the app allows it. That’s a huge perk.” Some developers wonder: what’s the catch? There is no catch. An article on TechCrunch hits this home when it notes, “…the “actually free” program isn’t a one-off promotion and that the company is committed to this program.”

OK, so now you’re wondering: why is Amazon doing this? In an article on CNBC, mobile Analyst Jack Kent says, “By paying for the apps, Amazon is showing that the app store's role is part of a bigger strategy to drive users into its ecosystem”. Developers like Amazon Underground too. Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal, Co-Founder and CEO of Games2Win says, “I believe Amazon Underground is a massive game changer for the Casual Gaming Business…” and then notes that Amazon Underground “…validates that 'time spent' is the most 'scalable, relevant and indexable' metric to reward mobile games consumption.”

VentureBeat thinks this is good for developers too, noting, “If the new model takes off, it could provide an interesting path to revenues for companies that are struggling with microtransactions in the free-to-play business model, where players can get a game or app for free and then pay for in-app items.”. We agree. One of the most important objectives of this program is to help developers make more money.

Check out all the articles below.

Amazon’s new mobile experience, Amazon Underground, is more than just a great shopping app. Sure, it offers customers hundreds of millions of products for purchase, including digital items like mobile apps and games, books, streaming movies, TV shows, and music—but with Amazon Underground’s innovative monetization approach, Amazon pays you for every minute a customer uses your Amazon Underground app ($0.002/minute at launch), and customers pay nothing.

If you are a developer of a premium or freemium mobile app or game, Amazon Underground will pay you for each minute your app is actually in use. That means, every minute your Amazon Underground app is being used, it’s generating revenue.

Today we introduced Amazon Underground to customers in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and France. Amazon Underground is a new Amazon shopping app for Android phones that has all of the functionality of our regular Amazon mobile shopping app plus an exciting new benefit: over ten thousand dollars in apps, games and in-app items that are #ActuallyFree. We’ve made this possible by working out a new business model for developers - we’ll pay you on a per-minute-played basis in exchange for you waiving your normal download or in-app fees.  This means, you can turn 100% of your Android users into revenue-generating customers, so from the minute your customers start playing, you start getting paid for each minute they use your Amazon Underground app. It’s a win for both customers and developers.