Just about the only complaint I hear from from WP users is that it doesn't have the apps they would like to use. If MS could prove that their phones had similar app support that Android and iPhones have many more people would be open to using them.
At this point people have been hearing "if WP just had more apps it would be a huge success!" for over three years. If that were true then why don't we see app developers porting apps to Windows Phone in anticipation of the great change?
Having owned and developed apps for the windows phone since 7, I almost think part of the problem is the tooling/languages available. As in, its too good.
The MS app store is flooded with so many cheap, quickly developed apps and knockoffs that finding anything good not simply produced by MS itself requires wading through stuff that's bad.
Could be I'm biased, refusing to buy anything I feel I could just make myself, but I can imagine as an app developer who actually tried to make money, developing for a platform where the margins are so low and the copying so easy probably doesn't provide much incentive.
The iOS and Android stores are massively better. Every week, a new flood of fake HBO, Xfinity, etc. apps are launched. Microsoft offered up to $2000 to devs to pump apps. Many are just wrappers around random YouTube channels or whatnot. MS encourages this.
MS even approved for sale, a fake Windows 8.1 update. That's how poorly it's handled.
Contacting MS is useless. In the case of the fake Dropbox app, the MS CSR said it worked fine and I should try reinstalling this. This is regarding an obvious fake/scam/phishing app.
Even legit publishers are finding it hard to get pirate copies of their apps removed. If you look at the top paid apps, some of them are media players, rebundling things like K-Like Codec Pack (at least in name). Pretty much any popular title will have plenty of fakes going around.
MS prioritizes one metric alone: number of apps published. The store is filled with useless shit and is an embarrassment. As a user, it makes the Store difficult to use. And even after you get through the outright scams, the overall quality is pretty terrible. Just poor UI, janky software.
It's a shame, because the MS dev tools are really fantastic, and the frameworks look great.
Totally agree. I can understand why the number of apps is what MS' marketing department focuses on (because most of the time when people compare stores, the number is the first thing discussed), but they need to take a stand and soon.
If Windows 10 has any significant uptake and given that its integrated search is the machine, the web AND the app store, I would think they would curate just to improve peoples search result quality, to try and avoid given the feature a negative image.
The technology world is full of traction/friction dilemmas and chicken/egg scenarios. There are entire businesses with billion dollar valuations based on user traction alone.
Chicken & egg problem. Being the first risks being the only one to move. Then you don't don't get the big push to profit from and you diverted resources away from your other projects (assuming that the kind of app developers needed for that would port their existing and actively maintained apps)
Appeal to developers, that's all. If your brand is not used by developers, nobody is going to start writing apps for your platform just out of the hobby. Plus, it takes time. Just look at iOS (2007) and Android (2008). You can't have an ecosystem by just snapping your fingers in the air.
Microsoft cannot promise developer incentives that actually scale. They have run several "hackathons" and "app contests" and things with eye-popping prize money, like $100k and whatnot.
But for most people, supporting an additional platform for any duration more than a year can quickly cost upwards of that amount. With the tiny marketshare today, and nothing but hope that it will ever grow - hope that has not come to fruition in 3-5 years - it will be a net loss very quickly and also have diverted resources from the other aspects of the developer's companies.
If they could perhaps offer scalable incentives, like "support and consulting services worth $2000 per month" or "we pay you $0.05 per download (even if your app is free)" or "we'll market your app alongside WP marketing" then perhaps. Perhaps it might be functional developer incentive.
Disclaimer/note: As a cofounder of a company built around an app that Microsoft tried to woo us to port. We toyed with their APIs for a bit, but it was going to be a support nightmare with our hardware and sensor requests and we decided against following through.
They had to block native code on WP7.x because they were on the CE kernel, knew they were going to move to the NT kernel in WP8, and native apps wouldn't have ported over.
Platform agnosticism is something that Qt exists to provide... Your point is taken that the Qt backend would need to be ported twice. For WP8+, I suppose that would involve a DX11 port of ANGLE for Qt5. Which seems to have been merged in, actually https://codereview.qt-project.org/#/c/52810/. What was WP7? DX9? Angle covers that, as well. So, I'm not sure why we're not seeing it, at least on WP8+ given that it does have native code support. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/jj6816...
