The Internet Cloud Giant Amazon has announced today that they will now allow the HTML5 web app developers to put price tags against each of their apps and sell them to users. Earlier all the HTML5 apps were on their own set to free as soon as they were tagged to the Appstore, but not Amazon insists that they come with Price tags like their competitive counterparts. Amazon’s recent analysis on the Appstore lead to the conclusion that developers would have less interest to stay with Amazon Appstore if their HTML5 apps are going to be served free to the users in the long run.
Amazon was the first Appstore that took the initiative of opening the doors to developers to host HTML5 apps and convert them to either web based apps or turn mobile apps into android apps that could be downloaded from any place in Amazon, with support of Kindle Fire devices, smartphones etc. There was no overhead on developers to do this conversion as Amazon itself was taking care of this conversion option. All the work such as packaging , addition of meta tags all were taken care by Amazon , on submission of the HTML5 App to the Appstore.
The move taken by Amazon was surely to beat the idea of Developers submitting their Apps to iOS first. For users, it can be quite difficult to note the changes between the native and the HTML5 apps , they are not hosted distinctly in the Appstore. This makes them quite tough to locate at a glance. There had been a noteable set of HTML5 developers who have participated by posting their own web apps, that could surely lead to the conception that the Web Apps developer group is turning to Android platform in quite large numbers.
All the present developers in Appstore can now log into using their respective Developer Account to view an updated section of “Availability & Pricing”. This would help developers to charge for their hosted apps. In last August, Amazon had enabled HTML5 developers to publish their hosted Web apps right next to the native Android apps in the Appstore; until today, they were all automatically set to free.
It is sure that Amazon will be taking a small percentage from the profits. As of now that web apps can be directly sold, developers are now eligible to join the promotion status of Free App of the Day . Though the developers will not get paid for the promotion, being with the promotion brings about some amount of benefits, that included being featured on portable devices through social networking sites.