How's the Amazon App Store Doing?

In November, Ziggy, an Android game developer, shared his Android game income stats. With the recent popularity of the Amazon Kindle Fire, Ziggy shares his experiences on the Amazon Android store … A blog post about how my Android games are doing on Amazon (surprisingly well). Based on Ziggy's numbers, we can see that the Kindle Fire has indeed had an impact on the Android ecosystem (even thought the Fire cannot be called an official Android devices). Also, we see that even though Amazon, Android users don't pay for apps.

I have to admit, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at watching Bus Jumper take off on the Amazon appstore. As I’ve mentioned earlier, the release of the Kindle Fire provided a big boost in my Amazon downloads over Christmas. I was half expecting things to die down to earlier levels after some time. Well, it’s been a month, and while the initial spike is gone, things seem to have settled down to a pretty decent state.

Free Version

I get about 100-200 Bus Jumper downloads per day from Amazon. My daily new user count (as reported by Flurry) varies between 500-800. So roughly 25% of my new users are coming from Amazon. That’s pretty significant. The total download count on Amazon just crossed 7000, which puts it in the top 3 behind Google. Note that I’ve been listed on some of the other non-Google stores for many months now. I suspect that in another month, Google and Amazon will be my top 2 stores.

...

Paid Version

The paid version is even more interesting. I’ve been selling about 1 copy a day, and have a total of 46 sales so far. Almost all of that is in the last month. Compare that to Google, where I’ve had 39 sales in all the time that the game has been listed there. The paid version is listed on a couple of other stores, and I’ve had 1-2 sales in total from those. From my small sample set, I would agree with some of the comments I’ve read about appstores and buyer psychology. Like Apple, Amazon has every Kindle user’s credit card on file, and I believe purchasing an app on the Apple and Amazon stores is a more streamlined process than on Google. That seems to make a difference. I used to believe that the stereotype of Android users being cheapskates had some truth to itAnd maybe it does, but maybe the buying experience also plays a role.