If you’re an Android developer, there’s not really any reason why you shouldn’t submit your App to Amazon’s alternative App Store. It’s extra exposure, won’t cost you a dime, and, because there’s considerably less competition, you actually might have better results there than in Google’s official app depot. Just make sure that if you agree to be the Free App of the Day, you completely understand what you’re getting yourself into.
Anyway, Amazon has gone ahead and sweetened the deal just a bit: beginning this morning, anyone who submits an app to the Amazon App Store store will get a free chunk of change to check out the Amazon Web Services suite.
Rather than being specifically purposed for any one of Amazon’s web services, the credit can be applied to:
- Amazon ElastiCache
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
- Amazon Elastic MapReduce
- Amazon CloudFront
- Amazon Relational Database Service(RDS)
- Amazon Route 53
- Amazon SimpleDB
- Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)
- Amazon Simple Notification Service(SNS)
- Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
- Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
- AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Now, don’t expect to run your app forever on the free credit: it’s only 50 bucks. Depending on which services you apply, that’s probably enough to cover your app’s costs through the testing phase and the early days of launch — but if things really start to take off, it’ll be a drop in the bucket before too long.
Amazon specifically says that this deal is good for any developers that “submit an app”, so it doesn’t sound like your App even necessarily needs to get approved. If you’re interested, make sure you get your app submitted by November 15th.
Here’s Amazon’s page on the deal.