We had a digital signage player app on Amazon appstore.
This month we tried to update it but the update got rejected and then already approved app was removed from the appstore.
The reasoning was given to us were very unclear and general but we finally figured out the real reason: not using IAP in the app
Thanks for writing in. Your app makes digital content available for purchase inside the app, charges end users to use the app or its content, or facilitates non-Amazon account creation. Therefore, to be made available on the Amazon Appstore, it must use Amazon’s In-App Purchasing API (or other methods we make available to you) to process payment for such content, and may not facilitate or direct customers to use any other payment method (including hyperlinks or QR code) for Content intended to be used within your Mobile App. The Amazon In-App Purchasing API makes it easy for you to offer digital content --such as in-game currency, expansion packs, upgrades, magazine subscriptions, and more--for purchase within your apps. It's easy to integrate and cost-effective to get up and running quickly, and our 1-Click purchase experience is simple, secure, and trusted and can increase conversion rates for purchases within your app.
The way our app works is that when it's launched we display a PIN on the screen that then the user needs to enter it in their account (Web client) in order to pair the screen and use it as digital signage and publish content.
We charge our users based on the number of paired screens.
We have been doing it, this way for 4 years now and all our competitors have exactly the same pairing flow.
No one in the digital signage industry uses Amazon IAP for their Amazon apps but for some reason, Amazon decided to remove just our app.
The reason why IAP does not makes sense here is because:
1. The amazon Fire TV App is used as digital signage and is not interactive: so user will not be able to interact with our amazon fire tv app and get or set billing information
2. Users usually have very large digital signage networks, sometimes they have a few hundred screens so for a user it does not makes sense to manage billing from an App
3. Most often user's digital signage runs not only on Fire Tv Sticks, but other platforms too: Android TV, Roku, Apple TV, Brightsign, IAdea... and they want to have centralised billing across. Having just different billing systems for each platform won't work.
4. Our users are businesses across the globe and amazon IAP is not sophisticated enough to support diverse payment methods such as Bank Transfers or Invoice issuing in multiple currencies etc
We think it's a clear misunderstanding. It looks like Amazon Appstore support is outsourced to India and we find it very hard to communicate or explain to them the purpose of our app: Our questions are never answered and when they are, the answers are always copy and paste texts from Amazon's documentation, which is very disappointing.
We are a startup and we have already lost crazy number of clients because of this, it's especially tough to run a business during Covid but Blocking our app without any explanation is just too much.
