FC Barcelona player Gerard Piqué for a live Twitch broadcast on Monday, April 18 – 9 AM PDT, 6 PM CET.  During the live broadcast, Gerard Piqué will showcase his app Final Kick, which is available through the Amazon Underground program. 

Spanish Footballer Gerard Piqué founded Kerad Games in 2012 and went on to create and distribute popular football games. In December 2015, Gerard Piqué launched Final Kick in Amazon Underground making the game 100% free for Amazon Underground customers. Final Kick is a freemium game where customers pay for in-app purchases on all other platforms, but those in-app purchase are 100% free on Amazon Underground.

Amazon Appstore is growing our UK team!  We invite you to learn more about the marketing, technical, and business development roles available in our central London office.  Learn more and apply at the links below. 

Online Content & Marketing Manager

Do you want to select the next big apps and games to feature on Amazon Appstore and Fire devices in the UK? Bring the customer shopping experience to the next level? We’re seeking an enthusiastic, organized and detail-oriented Online Content & Marketing Manager to help grow our business by using innovative merchandising techniques and testing. They will plan and schedule Appstore content across Fire tablets, Fire phone, Fire TV, Android and Blackberry devices and our Amazon.co.uk website.

In Dev Chat – Short Answers to Big Questions, our new video series of short videos created by Amazon Appstore, developers of successful apps and games answer your questions in less than 90 seconds.

From the Big Screen to the Living Room

In this edition of Dev Chat, Philip Mordecai from Curzon reveals why Amazon Fire TV provided the ideal platform to deliver its premium content into the heart of the living room. Many traditional businesses are launching digital units as they navigate a world where customers are engaging with content in new ways, whether it be online, mobile, or through connected devices in their homes.  Curzon, an 80- year old cinema chain based in the UK is no different.  Since late 2010 the company began operating its video on demand service – Curzon Home Cinema which delivers a highly curated selection of films direct to connected devices. “We tactically chose this route because we believe that consumers want to watch when they want and how they want and that choice should be open in a legal way,” commented Phil Mordecai.

In honor of the launch of UKTV Play on Fire TV this week, we invited Oliver Davies, Head of Digital Products for UKTV, to share his team’s experience developing the video on demand app.  UKTV is a multi-award winning media company that reaches over 42 million viewers every month through innovative TV channels such as Dave, Gold and Drama.

Fire TV and the Amazon Ecosystem

We’re all really excited about our video on demand app UKTV Play launching on Amazon Fire TV. It’s a great device that’s easy to use, puts a huge range of content and services at users’ fingertips and retails at a very keen price. I’m sure that it will be a big success and will only enhance our range of apps now and into the future. It’ll also be fascinating to see how the Amazon ecosystem will evolve and how the range of consumer devices will work together to offer an ever more joined up and frictionless experience for users in different environments. I’m particularly interested in the notion of anticipatory design that aim to answer questions users haven’t yet thought of asking, and I’m sure that new ways of interaction with technology exemplified by Amazon Echo will facilitate ever richer experiences for users.

In Dev Chat – Short Answers to Big Questions, our new video series of short videos created by Amazon Appstore, developers of successful apps and games answer your questions in less than 90 seconds.

In this edition, the people behind Ministry of Sound explain how they leveraged Amazon’s digital and physical distribution opportunities to monetize across business units and provide valuable insights into the process of developing an app for Fire TV.

Ministry of Sound is a global media and entertainment company with an impressive range of interrelated business units. In addition to their famed London club featuring dance and house music, Ministry of Sound combines one of the world’s largest independent labels with a tour and events business, a digital radio and video streaming presence and an apparel business.  Amazon facilitates sales of both physical and digital services for Ministry of Sound, meaning that they can sell physical copies of albums as well as promote their radio app all with one partner. 

Dev Chat – Short Answers to Big Questions, is a series of short videos created by Amazon Appstore in which developers of successful apps and games answer your questions in no more than 90 seconds.

In this edition, the creators of the Digital Concert Hall share their challenges and experiences in transferring the live experience of a classical concert to viewers based in New York, Berlin or Tokyo by using AWS and Fire TV.

In the London are area? We'll be at two events later this month in your area. Meet 1:1 with developer evangelists, get answers to your technical questions, participate in the Appstore Port-a-Thon, get a demo of Fire TV, and learn how to port your desktop and mobile games to the living room.

Amazon Developer Day: Bringing Apps to the Living Room

Fire TV will be available in the UK this Thursday, and the Appstore team is hosting a free developer day at our London office on October 29^th centered around bringing apps to the living room.

The Amazon Appstore Developer Day is designed to give you the essential tips, tricks and tools to distribute your app to Amazon customers. At the end of the afternoon, you will be able to publish your Android app directly to the Amazon Appstore.  At the event, our technical representatives will be on hand to provide support, answer your questions, and help you troubleshoot any issues.  We’ll have extra devices on-hand for you to use for testing.

Plus, we'll be giving away 2 tickets to Droidcon London and a Fire TV!

When: Wednesday, October 29, 2014 from 12:30 PM to 5:00 PM

Where: Amazon UK Offices at 60 Holborn Viaduct, London

Learn more and register: https://amazonappstoreuk.eventbrite.com

Droidcon London: Come Publish Your App

On October 30^th and 31^st, you can catch the team at Droidcon London.

Stop by our booth and experience the Fire Phone, Fire TV and Kindle Fire. Bring your APK and publish your app on the Amazon Appstore in as little as two hours! An Amazon evangelist will be on hand to help check compatibility and answer any questions about publishing your Android app on the Amazon Appstore. It’s easy and usually no changes are necessary because 75% of the apps we’ve checked just work! Each developer will be entered to win an Amazon device upon submission.

You can also hear our evangelist Paul Cutsinger talk about Responsive Game Design and Bringing Desktop and Mobile Games to the Living Room or try your hands on the Fire TV at the Droidcon Gaming Zone.

If you haven’t registered for Droidcon, use promo code AMAZON-DROIDCON-2014 and get 25% off.

Today, Amazon announced the availability of Amazon Fire TV in the UK and Germany. Amazon Fire TV is the best-selling streaming box on Amazon in the US since it launched in April, and makes it easy for users to stream movies, TV shows, and music as well as download apps and play games right on the HDTVs they already own.

For developers, Fire TV can help you increase your customer base by putting your app in the living room, in front of people who enjoy entertainment and may not have seen your apps before. With this expansion to customers in the UK and Germany, you’ll be able to reach even more customers on Fire TV. To promote rich user experiences, Fire TV enables full-featured game controllers, Dolby Digital Plus Certified surround sound and more. Android developers will find that developing for Fire TV is familiar, and optimizing their apps for the new controllers and TV display will not require learning a new language or new frameworks.

Fire TV is currently available in the US and retails for $99. Fire TV will ship on September 25, 2014 in Germany (€99) and October 23, 2014 in the UK (£79).

Here are some resources that we’ve published to help you get started with Amazon Fire TV.

Getting Started with Fire TV

• Amazon Fire TV Overview: Put Your Apps and Games on More Screens: A video overview of Amazon Fire TV and the opportunity that it brings for game developers. (May 29, 2014).
• Tips for Getting Your Android Apps Looking Good on Amazon Fire TV: Looking to get your Amazon App or Game on the new Amazon Fire TV?  We showed you how to get started and covered the top things you will need to know to be successful on TV. This included understanding Amazon Fire TV video outputs, updated Android layouts, TV overscan and colors, navigation, notifications and handling web content (April 17, 2014).
• ADB Debugging: How to Test Your Android APK on Fire TV. We released a video that walks through ADB debugging on Amazon Fire TV (May 29, 2014).

Game Development for Fire TV

• Building Responsive Game Design: Making Games That Scale across Desktop, Mobile and TV: We talked about responsive game design and what you can do to have your game run across multiple platforms and form factors like Tablets, Phones and now Amazon Fire TV (April 30, 2014).
• Building for the next Generation of Gamers with Fire TV: We covered how the Amazon Fire TV now offers you access to an entirely new generation of kids growing up as gamers. While traditional console game development is still out of reach for most, the Fire TV enables developers to target the casual gaming audience right now. It’s also an opportunity to be one of the first TV-based games that kids play (April 22, 2014)
• 10 Tips for Remote and Controller: We shared 10 Tips for adding remote and game controller support to your Amazon Fire TV games. One of the most exciting prospects of publishing your game on Amazon Fire TV is that you can run Android games directly on the TV. If you are already building games for Android, you can use the same codebase you currently have, and make that game playable on Amazon Fire TV (April 10, 2014).

In addition to the resources I’ve included above, be sure to check out these additional resources:

Purchase an Amazon Fire TV in the US, UK or Germany

Amazon Fire TV SDK Frequently Asked Questions

Amazon Fire TV SDK

Device Specifications

Display and Layout

User Interface

Design and User Experience Guidelines

Android Developer Multiple Screen Guidance

Supporting Different Screen Sizes

Supporting Different Densities

One question developers commonly ask us is how they can grow their business by introducing their app to new Amazon customers. The Amazon marketing team is here to help. Each day this week we’ll offer a tip on how to market your app on Amazon.

Marketing Tip #4: A picture is worth a thousand words. Submit visual marketing assets to make your detail page pop!

Customers respond well to great visuals, as screen shots and video help customers understand your app when they consider purchasing or downloading it. We encourage developers to submit visual marketing assets to grab the attention of customers who are considering download of purchase of your app.  Our marketing team has a few tips:

• Think of your detail page as a way to tell a narrative about your apps.
• Use visuals to demonstrate to curious customers how your apps look and feel.
• Take screenshots of different levels or features of your apps and display them in a logical order.
• Provide visuals that complement the story you tell in your description.
• The more visual marketing assets the better!

Steps to Upload Video and Screenshots

1) From the Mobile App Distribution Portal, navigate to the My Apps tab.

2) Select the app you'd like to edit and navigate to the Images & Multimedia tab for that app. Then, click the Edit button.

3) Upload your videos, images, and screenshots. 

Promotional Images

We are now accepting promotional images, and our marketing team is using these images in featured placements to highlight apps to customers. Promotional artwork gives you an opportunity to capture the attention of customers using colorful imagery that reflects the essence of your apps. We encourage you to submit your promotional image now to take advantage of these new marketing opportunities. If you missed it, learn more about how your app can be considered for featured placements by visiting tip #2.

Sample Promotional Image

Recommendations for creating effective imagery:

• Strive for an engaging image that speaks to what your app is all about. 
• Create promotional imagery that is colorful and promotes the essence of your app and brand.
• Text should be large and readable.  Keep text simple.
• Do not add the price to the image ($0.99) or any discount call outs (50% off)

Steps to Upload Promotional Imagery

1) Create or use an existing promotional image that is 1024 x 500 pixels. The images file should be in PNG or JPG format. 

2) From the Distribution Portal, navigate to the My Apps tab.  Select the app you'd like to edit and navigate to the Images & Multimedia tab for that app. Then, click the Edit button.

3) Select Upload Image from the Promotional Image field.  Choose the image you’d like to upload, and then save the image.  Images must be 1024 x 500 in PNG or JPG format.

Note: Effective 08-26-2015 Free App of the Day (FAD) has been replaced with Amazon Underground.

One question developers commonly ask us is how they can grow their business by introducing their app to new Amazon customers.  The Amazon team is here to help. Each day this week we’ll offer a tip on how to market your app on Amazon.

Marketing Tip #3: Nominate your app for the Free App of the Day Program

The Free App of the Day (FAD) is a curated promotional opportunity, where Amazon offers one paid app to customers free each day.  Participation in FAD helps you gain greater exposure and drive significant traffic to your app. The apps we select are featured in some of the most visible marketing placements, including placements on mobile devices, Kindle Fire, and the Amazon Gold Box Best Deals page, and are complemented by social media exposure including a Facebook post and Twitter tweet.  These placements and the exposure they provide drive significant traffic to the featured apps and allow the developers to grow their installed base quickly. 

We work closely with developers to offer a high-quality app or game that we think our Appstore customers will like and make it available for free, for a day.  Developers like Fire Maple Games and Vervv LLC have shared information on their FAD experiences through posts here on our developer blog. If you’d like to nominate your app for inclusion in the Free App of the Day program, locate the app within the Distribution Portal, and on the Availability & Pricing tab, find the Free App of the Day (FAD) eligibility option at the bottom of the page. Check the “Yes, please consider this app for the program” box.  Please also email the team at fadmail@amazon.com and include the name of the paid app that you are interested in featuring. 

If you have any questions or want to discuss the opportunity further, please email fadmail@amazon.com

One question developers commonly ask us is how they can grow their business by introducing their app to new Amazon customers. The Amazon team is here to help. Each day this week we’ll offer a tip on how to market your app on Amazon.

Marketing Tip #2: Submit your app to our marketing team for consideration for a featured marketing placement. 

We constantly strive to introduce Amazon customers to new apps they’ll love, thus helping our developers grow their businesses. We highlight apps through our storefronts on mobile devices, Kindle Fire, and Amazon.com and through marketing vehicles like e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter.  For example, as I write this, featured placements include “Highly Rated Apps and Games” and “Featured New Releases,” and your app would be considered for these placements as applicable.  Your app may also be considered for seasonally relevant placements like summer travel, back to school, or learning apps.

If you are interested in a featured placement through our marketing vehicles, we invite you to tell us more about your mobile app by completing our marketing request form available through the Amazon Mobile App Distribution Portal. 

Follow these steps to complete the form:

1) Check the Amazon Specific ID Number (ASIN) for your app on the Amazon.com site.

2) Navigate to the marketing section of the FAQ page. 

3) Click the link to the form available under the question “How do I get my app marketed?” 

4) Submit information about your app for our consideration by filling out the form.  Please include the ASIN number you recorded from the Amazon.com site.