Amazon UndergroundAmazon just started footing the bill for some of your Android apps, as long as you download them through its own store. The company is even covering all those app’s in-app purchases through the new “Underground” program.

In total, Amazon said its offering anyone willing to use its app store $10,000 worth of free content.

Amazon Underground
Amazon Underground

The company listed 471 “actually free” apps on Wednesday morning, but Amazon is calling it a “long-term program” that will be updated over time.

Amazon explains the program works on a new business model where it pays app makers based on the number of minutes its customers use each app.

When I tried it out, I was able to download Goat Simulator, which costs $4.99 in the Google Play store, for free. I also downloaded Deal or No Deal. When I got to a point where the game would usually offer a chance to buy additional tokens to keep playing, it listed the price as $0.00.

Deal or No Deal from Amazon Underground
Deal or No Deal from Amazon Underground

These apps aren’t exactly easy to get, since virtually no one is on the Amazon Fire Phone where the store you need to download them comes built-in.

You can get the store on Android, but not through Google Play. You first have to download the Amazon app directly from the company’s website, and then change your device’s settings to allow outside software to be installed, ignoring a warning that what you’re doing could harm your phone.

And that’s just to get the store that makes it possible to then download the free apps.

It’s a bit of a process that your average smartphone user probably won’t stumble across, but that’s why Amazon is offering the discount in the first place.

Amazon dominates the e-commerce industry, from online shoe shopping to e-book downloads. But the company is hardly a player at all in the quickly growing world of mobile app sales. Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS mobile operating systems together own about 96 percent of the smartphone market, and they both have their own app stores that come preinstalled and are simple to use. Worse yet, those stores don’t even let you download Amazon’s app with its own store.

After the Fire Phone’s flop, Amazon has been forced to fight for customers as a third-party app on Google’s own turf.

The company has offered promotions like this before, but Underground seems like the most drastic attempt yet to win users over.

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