I think it's true that there is a huge opportunity for someone like Amazon here.
However, I rather disagree that Amazon will ever provide a panacea. The Amazon market currently poses its own problems to app sellers. Once your app is on their market, you do not control it.
Amazon sets the price, Amazon sets the description and classification. If Amazon hires some marketing copy-writer to write your app's description and that person doesn't know anything about your app, guess who gets to deal with angry customers who didn't get what they were expecting? It won't be Amazon.
Amazon has had some technical hangups that be explained by 'early product bugs'. While I expect such problems to be eventually ironed out by better QA and development processes, my understanding is that they have not yet been ironed out.
Finally, the Amazon market is tiny compared to Google's. If I told you that putting your software on Amazon's market would net you 5% of the sales you get on Google's, but you'd spend just as much time fighting through problems in the market itself, would you jump on that opportunity? I probably would not.
You hit the nail in the head with Amazon Appstore app description issue. Our app has had (and still has) that problem. Our content has been written by Amazon, but we have no control over it. In the meantime, our app (and even our business model) has evolved but the description is still the old description. As a result we get emails from confused users.
However, I rather disagree that Amazon will ever provide a panacea. The Amazon market currently poses its own problems to app sellers. Once your app is on their market, you do not control it. Amazon sets the price, Amazon sets the description and classification. If Amazon hires some marketing copy-writer to write your app's description and that person doesn't know anything about your app, guess who gets to deal with angry customers who didn't get what they were expecting? It won't be Amazon.
Amazon has had some technical hangups that be explained by 'early product bugs'. While I expect such problems to be eventually ironed out by better QA and development processes, my understanding is that they have not yet been ironed out.
Finally, the Amazon market is tiny compared to Google's. If I told you that putting your software on Amazon's market would net you 5% of the sales you get on Google's, but you'd spend just as much time fighting through problems in the market itself, would you jump on that opportunity? I probably would not.