Amazon is shutting down their Underground Actually Free program. If you were on Android, it was a pretty cool service where, by using the Amazon app, there was a wide variety of games that could be had for no cost to you…ever. Paid games were free, and free-to-play games included some premium currency for you to play without ever paying. The whole thing was kind of like digging through the $5 DVD bin at Walmart. You’re digging through a lot of unrelated, uninteresting to you stuff to find the gems, but there are some real gems in there if you dig. Developers got paid based on time spent in the app, and I’m sure Amazon got a bunch of analytics data and found a way to draw non-Fire users to their app, which isn’t on Google Play, and developers got paid for their library content.
But I guess either the program wasn’t driving enough people to the Amazon app, or it wasn’t making financial sense for neither Amazon nor developers, so Underground is going away. New app submissions are closing on May 31st for Amazon Underground Actually Free, though updates can be made until 2019. Users will lose access to the Actually Free store in the summer, though those apps will still work.
