Amazon Underground: How to get free Android apps

Amazon is giving away free apps. In fact, it has been dishing out free Android apps for the last couple of months, although Amazon Underground has only recently launched outside of the UK.

No, don’t adjust your set, I’m not going crazy and this isn’t some weird ponzi scheme. These are 100% free apps, with free in-app purchases, so you don’t pay a single penny to access the full-fat paid-for app.

Known as Amazon Underground, this free app initiative is a valliant effort to crack into the app space that Google‘s Play Store and Apple‘s App Store dominate so easily. Underground was new, different and promised to shake up how apps work; but what exactly is Amazon Underground, and how can you get it?

Going Amazon Underground

Released as a separate app to the Amazon App Store, essentially replacing the standard Amazon Shopping app, Underground is an app store with a difference: everything is free. Yes, everything – it’s completely and utterly free.

That sounds like madness, I know, but Amazon is using Underground to offer up over £1,000-worth of apps, games and in-app purchases (IAPs) completely free of charge. This means you can enjoy a wide selection of games without having to pay a penny, or worry that you’ll be hit with a paywall partway through play.

Initially, Amazon pitched Underground as a semi-uprising against free-to-play game mechanics, calling out developers for including costly IAPs. It’s so adamant about its campaign that it uses every opportunity to let you know it’s giving you apps and games for nothing.

“Many apps and games that are marked as “free” turn out not to be completely free,” reads a letter designed like a secret telegram on the Amazon Underground website. “They use in-app payments to charge you for special items or to unlock features or levels. In Underground, you will find 100% free versions of popular premium titles…”

The appeal of Amazon Underground to consumers is obvious: great premium apps for diddly-squat, alongside some excellent free-to-play titles, without the chokehold of IAPs. What’s less clear is how Amazon is actually planning to fund this new venture – which it claims “is a long-term program rather than a one-off promotion”. Amazon has promised developers they’ll be paid 0.13p per minute played in their app. While that’s not the greatest money around, it might actually work out better for some bigger app developers who see a drop off on IAP spending compared to an apps total number of users.

When those users start browsing Amazon Underground, Amazon has made it incredibly easy to see that everything is free. Almost everything is labelled with “Actually Free”, for example charts are titled “Actually Free Kids Games” and all of the banner ads contain “#ActuallyFree” somewhere on them. These screen-dominating banners will be turned into general advertising, helping to generate money to pump back into the service to keep it going.

Not that Amazon doesn’t have the deep pockets to pay developers included in the service, but it’s worth asking why it wants, or feels, the need to. A clue to Amazon’s motives can be found in the second paragraph of the aforementioned online letter.

“Normally you’d go to Google Play to download an Android app onto your phone,” it reads. “But Google’s rules don’t allow an app that offers apps or games to be included in Google Play.”

While that particular sentence is clearly referencing the fact the Amazon Appstore app is banned from Google Play, its wording suggests a deeper distaste towards the platform. Perhaps Underground is Amazon’s way to lure people from Play and have them use its own app store instead?

Why does Amazon Underground exist?

Until recently, Amazon had been treating its Underground app store a bit like the black sheep of the family. It was there, but nobody really aknowleged its existence beyond a press release and a shady button in the updated Android Amazon app. However, when Underground finally released Europe-wide at the start of December, we were finally given some insight from Amazon App Store director Aaron Rubenson.

“About a year ago we were talking to customers, developers and the like, and each was telling us their concerns about the apps market segment in general,” said Rubenson in a statement to The Inquirer. “On the customer side we heard that there are so many apps and games out there it’s difficult to know which ones are of good quality and which are worth spending money on. Most customers know the top developers but then it falls off very rapidly.

“We also heard frustration with the freemium model. Some developers told us that they would rather charge upfront, and for those that had adopted the freemium model found that only two to three percent of customers actually purchased, which makes it hard to make a profit. Somehow the industry had evolved to the point that for content creators it had become a difficult place.”

That’s not the only reason why Amazon is all over the free apps market, it’s hoping there’s a knock-on effect for its other store products.

“[Amazon Underground] is good for Amazon in a couple of ways,” continued Rubenson. “Firstly, this is also the Amazon shopping app. We hope people engage with Underground often and when they do, discover the other great things that we offer and some will go on to buy other goods. There’s a lot for us in driving high frequency engagement with the mobile channel. The other way is that when customers download apps and games, occasionally we’ll show an advert. They’re before the start-up sequence, they never ruin the flow of the game, its not often, but that’s another way.”

Amazon Underdog?

Google’s own Play Store sees a billion active users per day, amounting to over 50 billion app installs a year, and pulling in a tidy sum of money at the end of it. The same goes for Apple who, earlier this year, saw its App Store surpass 100 billion downloads and 1.4 billion users since launch. While neither company discloses sole revenue from its services, Apple gave back $10 billion to developers after taking a cut of the profits – $3 billion more than Google – showing that getting into the app store business is good money.

Yet, Amazon is a long way behind in the app download marketplace. If Amazon Underground can help get more people using its App store, and improve general mobile sales of Amazon goods, that can only be a good thing. Suddenly paying 7.8p an hour to developers so it can serve up free apps seems like a worthwhile expense for the extra money Amazon will receive through improved sales, ad revenue and data collection.

Interestingly, Amazon may have also inadvertently hit upon a way for Android developers to skirt around the rampant piracy issues plaguing the platform. If Amazon can facilitate users’ discovery of a developer’s app, pay the developer so the user can play for free, and increase the sales of said developer’s other paid apps, that’s certainly not a bad thing to have happen to the mobile app industry.