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 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.