Amazon

[Android Fan]

Would drastic be free if amazon ever allows emus on the store?
If paid would you guys apply the app for the free app of day promo atleast once xD

[Exophase]

It'd be a real rarity for an app store to change their policy to become more inclusive...

I don't want to make it free on a major platform that isn't niche (and personally interesting to me) like Pandora is (or Pyra will be). That's bound to cause a lot of Android users or future users to be unhappy.

Do apps really receive nothing for free app of the day promos? I always figured the store paid them something to compensate.

[TkSilver]

Do apps really receive nothing for free app of the day promos? I always figured the store paid them something to compensate.

I figured they do it for the metrics. Get your app installed on more devices, get put into the top downloaded list, more ppl see you, ???, profit?
Or like the millions upon millions of pieces of shovelware out there game for free, iap to death.

In all seriousness if someone does not do their due diligence(research) on lets say Nintendo DS emulators. They go to an app store and look up nintendo ds emulators the higher listed ones are the ones with more downloads and if they do not trust user reviews because well those are becoming less and less reliable with the idea of rating hostage taking (using your rating to get the app developer to answer a question that you could look up yourself on the google). You end up with ppl downloading a different emulator. To be fair though seeing as drastic is well to put it nicely the best working *cough* only working *cough* android NDS emulator that is really not as needed as generic RPG game X needs to worry about metrics.

So the compensation is a chance at increased sales numbers Exo, but seeing how you have a demo and many many pirates every day trying to crack your emulator you have enough "free" publicity anyways.

[Exophase]

Yeah, I'm with you on app exposure when it comes to emulators.

We're not even listed in the top apps lists. We got delisted at some point a long time ago, I don't even think we got an e-mail about it so I don't know why, although I'm going to guess it's because we have Nintendo in the description. Since it's a delist and not a full on app drop I have to assume that we're not actually doing something that violates the app TOS.

The same thing happened to SuperGnes, resulting in them relisting the emulator with a different name, but keeping the old one up so people didn't lose access to it (because it's pretty much impossible to get Google to reverse a change in app status, which is very bad news if paid apps get dropped like VGBA did). Frankly I don't really care that we're not in the listing because like you said, people who want emulators know to look for them, and I'm not exactly dying to reach out to new people who have never heard of emulators before and could be very confused as to what the app actually is.

As for as user reviews go, more reliable ratings is one of the perks of an app being for pay. The app developer probably won't buy positive reviews in any meaningful quantity like they can for free apps because it's too expensive. Likewise, a disgruntled user won't buy negative reviews or manually spam them. Hostage reviews are unfortunately a thing, but they don't tend to be too dominating and other emulators will get them too.

[Android Fan]

I read that free apps dev gets paid a bit but could be wrong
The only positive thing is explosure some apps were downloaded a huge amount of times when they got free for a day
And many of the top android games/apps were free for 1 day
Five nights at freddies 3 for example was free just yesterday and game of thrones 2 days ago in a big pack of free apps
Terraria was free on xmas along with many other apps in a big pack xD

[ericbazinga]

I read that free apps dev gets paid a bit but could be wrong
The only positive thing is explosure some apps were downloaded a huge amount of times when they got free for a day
And many of the top android games/apps were free for 1 day
Five nights at freddies 3 for example was free just yesterday and game of thrones 2 days ago in a big pack of free apps
Terraria was free on xmas along with many other apps in a big pack xD

Yeah those packs are awesome. The coolest thing about them though is that sometimes expensive apps are included. For example i once got Polaris Office (a $15 value) for free, and I've gotten some Oxford Dictionary apps for free too, and those go for about $30

[Android Fan]

I read that free apps dev gets paid a bit but could be wrong
The only positive thing is explosure some apps were downloaded a huge amount of times when they got free for a day
And many of the top android games/apps were free for 1 day
Five nights at freddies 3 for example was free just yesterday and game of thrones 2 days ago in a big pack of free apps
Terraria was free on xmas along with many other apps in a big pack xD

Yeah those packs are awesome. The coolest thing about them though is that sometimes expensive apps are included. For example i once got Polaris Office (a $15 value) for free, and I've gotten some Oxford Dictionary apps for free too, and those go for about $30

Haha yeah man i like those too sadly i found out about this whole freebies thing back in december 2014 after 3 years of being an android user so far i have 400+ paid apps just after a few months use of the store the funny thing is how i found about it i badly wanted terraria back in december 10 or something when it got its big 1.2 update and after a few days i see amazon giving the game for free on xmas i just get some weird luck somedays xD