More and more stores are born every month because everyone wants to have some piece of the cake.

And some of these stores qre quite creatively when it comes to makign money.

The biggest ones driving me crazy lately was Samsung and Amazon App Store.

Both of them plan to collect fees from the developers when they like to publish their aps at their stores.

While Samsung says you have to pay for testing your app, Amazon goes the way of collecting a annual fee of 100$ per year.

And there is still the marge when you sell something.

So for Indy Developers that can be very tricky at least because they often are just not able to do heavy marketing for their apps - meaningless how good they are.

And neither Samsung nor Amazon does sufficient marketing as long as your app is not well popular over the globe.

So that left that stores to the bigger publishers who can afford big marketing campaigns.

Let's think about devs who are willed to pay for publishing their apps there. What will happen to the apps, when the Dev stops paying?

Will the app stay there? What about users who already bought such an app? Will they have to pay another time on another store to get support and updates again?

Sure, most of the big apps are developed onc, then freezed and another sequel is produced, that's how it works and I am pretty sure. Amazon and Samsung surely aim for exactly that big developers and companies even when they say, that they do aim for high quality apps.
I can show you tons of high quality apps out there which are highly marketed but are only made of mid-range quality while there are other games which are done quiet well but are lost deep on page 5.243 of the "Best Apps", which is sad.

So - as a dev - I cannot recommend using Amazon. And I warn everyone to use the Samsung App Store, because they did not even tell you, that it will cost money in some weeks for the devs to put up a new version.

I've asked samsung about the costs, but they still don't tell anything about it. All what they say is, that it is currently free of charge, because of promotion and it will stay free until 30 Jun .. that's quite nice info .. useless, but nice :-)

So, there also: No recommendation for the Samsung App Store.

And yes, for sure, all that costs can certainly pay off when publishing your apps there, yes. But the thing is, am I willed to do so? They test your app on all the devices you specify - that could be indeed a helpful service for devs, but at least it is Samsung who wants to offer only apps which are displayed well on their devices. So even, when everything is fine, cause you cared for your app you'll have to pay for that testing procedure. And you have to give them even more of your revenue, when someone buyed your app and it is not clear if Samsung does help you sell an app because you do not have any benefit over other competitors. In truth bigger companies will still get more benefit from it. So they should decide, if they wanna have their %% or if they wanna get payed buy reviewing your app I think.

Or maybe the quality of their service will change and they DO raise the quality but to be honest, I don't think so. You will not get featured with a not-already-popular-app or when you are not-already a popular developer. That's the game - which I understand with the point of view of the stores.

So, if you are an Indy Developer and was not so lucky to get any big hit recently .. publishing on Amazon or Samsung will not help you out - it will merely cost you money.

As I can tell, google play has the most potential currently and I am pretty sure, that this will last just a little bit longer ;-)

I wonder if any Indy-Dev have tried to publish their apps on their own without any support from app stores .. but I don't think so ;-)

Dont read this post as completely negative, it is very clear, that those stores will stay nearly free of - call it: newcomer apps. But it does not mean that it will only consist of high quality apps. We will see, what happens xD