Monetizing Your App with Amazon Underground

Introduction

Amazon Underground is a unique way to monetize your apps. This page discusses how Amazon determines payments to developers participating in Amazon Underground, how to forecast how much money your apps might make with Amazon Underground, and how to view your earnings from your participating apps.

Determining Payment for Amazon Underground

For Amazon Underground apps, your payments are based on the number of minutes that customers use your app. The next sections go into detail about how Amazon calculates your payments earned for your Amazon Underground apps.

Please review the Amazon Underground Schedule for complete program terms.

Calculating Usage Time

As part of Amazon Underground, you are paid for the amount of time that customers have used your app. To determine the usage time, at the end of a 24-hour reporting period, Amazon calculates the total time aggregated (in milliseconds) multiplies it by the royalty rate, and rounds this number to the smallest unit of currency for your marketplace. For example, in the US, this number will be rounded to the nearest cent.

Amazon determines app usage as the amount of time that an Android Activity for your app is open and running in the foreground of a mobile device. Amazon uses four standard Android lifecycle calls to determine when an Activity gains or loses focus and is in the foreground:

• onStart
• onPause
• onResume
• onStop

Apps that close prematurely (or crash) and do not trigger the appropriate events will have reduced accuracy in usage measurements. Try to manage your app crashes and activity lifecycle events appropriately to ensure an accurate usage measurement for Amazon. See the Android developer documentation about the Android Activity Lifecycle for recommendations:

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Activity.html

Calculating app usage is one reason why Amazon Underground requires that you have a unique package name for your app (in addition to avoiding collisions when users have more than one version of your app installed on a mobile device). Having a unique package name helps ensure that your app's usage time is calculated accurately.

If a user is engaged with your app but does not have an active data connection, for example, for users who have your app open while in airplane mode, the usage time is logged and sent to Amazon when the mobile device re-connects to WiFi or another data connection.

Payment Rates

Amazon Underground offers the following payment rates, based on your marketplace:

These rates are subject to change, based on the terms described in the Amazon Underground Schedule.

Tax Withholding

Your Amazon Underground earnings are subject to the same tax withholding rate (if applicable) as your other Amazon Appstore earnings.

Leaving Amazon Underground

If your app leaves Amazon Underground, you are paid for app usage for the temporary grace period described in the Amazon Underground Schedule. See the Amazon Underground Schedule for more information about leaving Amazon Underground.

Viewing Your Amazon Underground Payment Reports

You can review your Amazon Underground payments on the Reporting tab of your account in the Amazon Apps & Services Developer Portal. The Reporting tab allows you to view both sales and earnings for your apps. On these tabs, you will be able to create filtered reports to view your Amazon Underground sales and earnings to both monitor their progress and compare them to any non-Underground apps that you might have in the Amazon Appstore.

Although you receive a single payment for both your Amazon Underground and non-Underground earnings from your app, you will see two separate entries on your earnings reports for Amazon Underground and non-Underground apps.

Last updated: Jul 13, 2017