Visit the Amazon Android App Store for a new free Android app for your business - or just for fun! - every day.

According to the latest stats, IOs and Android apps were downloaded over 1,000,000,000 times in a single day after Christmas. You read that right - over one billion apps for iPhones, iPads, and Androids were downloaded in a single day.

While that's not a normal day (Christmas causes a bump), it gives you some idea of the size - and potential profits - of the app marketplace. Apple has the iPhone market locked down - but the Android market, like the Android platform, is open. And Amazon is fighting Google for a share of the profits. In this case, competition among the giants benefits the consumer.

You might be surprised to learn that it matters which store you download your apps - even your free apps - from. Not all apps are available in all marketplaces. Updates will have to be downloaded from the same store that housed the app you downloaded. Payments (if any) are collected by the store which pays a royalty to the developer.

Amazon has to convince potential customers to go through the trouble of downloading, installing, and activating Amazon's Appstore before they can get your business (the Google Marketplace is loaded on all Android phones straight out of the box.) To convince you to spend a minute or two of your time getting set up, Amazon gives away a different paid app every day for free.

The majority of these free-for-a-day paid apps are games (the majority of everything is games) - but there have been some excellent productivity apps included in the deals, especially when the Kindle Fire was introduced.

Amazon also offers many popular commercial apps at a discount. If you need to sync your Droid with your employer's Exchange server, for instance, you can find Touchdown for Exchange for only $10.00 instead of its normal $20.00 price tag.

To get started, visit the Amazon Appstore on Amazon's web site and look for the "Get Started" box on the right hand side. Follow the directions (check here for step-by-step instructions) and you are on your way. Then, just open the Amazon Appstore each day to see the latest deal.