Amazon Giving Developers $15,000 In Coins For Apps - With A Catch

Developers need a reason to bring their wares to a platform. More often than not (read: just about always), that reason is money. Developers need incentive to bring apps and things to a new ecosystem. To encourage Development on their Fire OS platform, Amazon is offering their own currency to potential Developers.

Amazon will "gift" Developers with up to $15,000 in Amazon Coins for bringing approved apps to the platform. The deal isn't meant to be some sort of straight-up trade, though: Amazon is letting Developers gift those Coins to us. The aim is to provide incentives for users to make in-app purchases. Think of it like a "first one's on us" scheme.

Developers will get up to $5,000 in Coins (about 500,000 actual Coins) per app, and can top out at $15,000, or 1.5 million Coins. Amazon is also only giving Coins to those Developers who build apps specifically for the platform, so those paltry ports simply won't do. Take advantage of APIs and Dynamic Perspective, though, and you could get coins. Mandatory is that Developers take advantage of the carousel widget feature.

Developers can also use Coins to create a marketing campaign around, where winners get a Coin prize. Developers are likely to use the Coins as a means to keep us looped into their app, kind of like a bank. Open an account and use it, a bank will often give you incentives after six months' time. The same likely goes here, where downloading and using an app will someday get you Coins.

Source: TechCrunch