
Managed to download the free app yesterday (in UK with UK Amazon login) but it's not worked today. Looks like a slip-up on Amazon's part yesterday to open it up to everyone (?) that's since been closed.
Amazon users around the world are reporting that the retailer's Android store is now selling apps worldwide, despite the company's denials and our own failure to buy anything. Amazon's alternative app store was launched in the US only, and the company tells us that this remains the case. However users from Australia, India, …
Don't use amazon's app store.
Their business practices towards small developers make Apple look like Mother Theresa. Changing app descriptions without consent, changing app pricing without consent, there are several long articles by devs explaining why they're pulling their apps.
http://bithack.se/news/apparatus-amazon-july-4-2011.html
http://shiftyjelly.wordpress.com/2011/08/02/amazon-app-store-rotten-to-the-core/
So you're complaining that they are acting like a retail shop? At most shops (both physical and web based), it is the owner of the shop who decides how to present the stock and what price to sell items at (presumably setting the prices to maximise their own cut).
If anything, the model used by Apple's App Store and Google's Android Market where developers have absolute control is an aberration.
It isn't clear that Amazon's model is much better, but it isn't obvious that it is just bad because it is different. Secretly offering $0 to the developers of the free app of the day seems like a bit of a dick move though.
Any retail shop that arbitrarily decides what price it will pay its wholesaler will quickly find itself without any suppliers. The retailer can decide how much it wants to put on top of the wholesale price, or can decide to run it as a loss leader, but unless it's a supermarket screwing farmers the wholesale price is a matter for negotiation.
...as you can witness the debut of Central-European localized online stores of apple.com
I might be off but I see the causality here - the biggest threat to Apple's growth is Amazon and the day when it goes global with its upcoming $250 "media consuming" tablet.