Why Publishing on the Windows Phone is Like Walking Barefoot On Broken Glass

https://toshl.com/blog/why-publishing-on-the-windows-phone-marketplace-is-like-walking-barefoot-on-broken-glass/

by Beat-O • 14 years ago

189 92 14 years ago

Our story of why publishing on the Windows Phone Marketplace is horrible in many, many ways. How arbitrary and moralistic is the certification policy, the numbers are low, international developers ignored... The list goes on. We'd be happy to hear about your experiences.

BadassFractal• 14 years ago

Does anybody have a positive experience with publishing to the Windows app store that they'd like to share?

recoiledsnake• 14 years ago

Here's one http://www.fourbrosstudio.com/taptitude/post/2012/04/17/Tapt...

tysonjennings• 14 years ago

That's a pretty worthless example with nothing to compare it against. Had the developers released it on iOS or Android and had more success on Windows Phone then you would have an argument otherwise you really don't.

siger2• 14 years ago

I haven't published anything to the App Store or Google Play, so I can't compare, but I have nothing bad to say about publishing my app (and its updates) on the WP Marketplace.

latch2• 14 years ago

I'm not sure why they don't just pull the app. They admit that it's bringing them virtually no users and it's a frustrating experience. With only a 1.3% market share (1), what reasons can there be to bother with it?

(1) http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/?p=32494

pooriaazimi• 14 years ago

Funny thing is that the ancient, discontinued Windows Mobile has 2.9% market share, more than twice of that of Windows Phone 7 Mobile Pocket edition, released October 2010 (21 months ago)!

Mythbusters3• 14 years ago

It took android a couple of years after it was launched to actually take off...

technoslut2• 14 years ago

Sometimes I think it's best for a developer to take a chance instead of playing it safe because it can bring a greater reward. They chose a platform they enjoyed and which they could get in on the ground floor. As they say, fortune favors the bold.

As an example, if The Omni Group decided to go to Windows instead of NeXTStep, there's a possibility that they would never be successful as they are now.

latch2• 14 years ago

Explains why they tried, doesn't explain why they are sticking to it, unless they imagine the story, both in terms of market penetration and developer support, is going to get considerably better.

amishforkfight2• 14 years ago

I'd imagine the allure of getting in early, perhaps?

einhverfr• 14 years ago

I don't know what markets Windows Phone is used in though.

if you look at a device like the Symbol MC50 and think about how much nicer it might be to integrate actual phone service with it, so there may be room in the market for Windows Phone PDT's and the like (the Symbol MC50 is basically a portable data terminal with WIFI capability running Windows Mobile.

Again it may depend on your market.

zanny• 14 years ago

1.3% of ~a billion strong device market can still be a lot of customers in a 13 million target device audience. Not as big as the other players by an order of magnitude, but many folks the size of app dev teams make livings off small town shops serving less than a thousand customers.

batgaijin2• 14 years ago

They say it's the same problem they would have with the apple/andorid store.

Big corp doesn't have nice ways of changing shit, this isn't specific to M$.

stickfigure• 14 years ago

Apple can treat their developers like shit because they provide access to an enormous marketplace of users. If Microsoft thinks that they can operate the same way, the windows phone platform will be stillborn.

mcantelon• 14 years ago

android ecosphere's pretty light-handed.

batgaijin2• 14 years ago

I think the exemption of GPL'd apps because of how they modify them is the primary one that makes me so angry...

jpxxx2• 14 years ago

It know it's one of those irrational "the things you can't say on TV are the things you can't say on TV" kind of situations, but sexual innuendo and financial software don't mesh.

sp3323• 14 years ago

I know, I thought it was a bit too much. They really can't see how some people might be offended?

amishforkfight2• 14 years ago

Who would get offended by that? It's not even close to offensive.

guard-of-terra3• 14 years ago

Write your own app without sexual innuendo

Compete

hobin• 14 years ago

It doesn't? I thought it was pretty funny.

outworlder• 14 years ago

Maybe not.

However, if that's the case, the review team should point that out, specifically.

deerpig• 14 years ago

So much for Balmer's "developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers...."

Mythbusters3• 14 years ago

Windows Phone 8: Gaining Apps, Software Developer Support: http://www.thevarguy.com/2012/07/12/windows-phone-8-apps-mob...

Tloewald2• 14 years ago

Windows 8 -- sorry if you bought into WP7... But this time...

nl• 14 years ago

If you read the article you'll discover that developers are interested but few are actually writing apps or activley planning to write apps for it.

I think that is a fair summary.

SlipperySlope• 14 years ago

Could it be that the trouble with developing for a mobile OS lumped in the 'other' category is that it is not a major ecosystem?

iPhone and Android app stores are well-worn paths for hundreds of thousands of developers world wide - right or wrong?

1010011010• 14 years ago

Have they decided to drop Windows Phone yet?

spaghetti• 14 years ago

At least when they do the screen won't shatter!!!!1

nnq• 14 years ago

"Offensive" context example: Imagine you're a woman in some mostly-islamic-and-not-so-women-rights-friendly country, you use this app on your phone and bang, your husband sees the loading screen joke about "other toys" (and of course he has an iphone and doesn't know about this app and the joke) ...only he can't remember seeing those toys himself so... who did you buy them for then? ...nex: let your ultra-violent imagination run wild

facorreia2• 14 years ago

I can see how this would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence.

rogerbinns3• 14 years ago

What I find fascinating is the app store URL. It includes en-US and the app is identified by a GUID so you have no chance of working out what it is other than clicking on the link. Locales of fr-CA and fr-FR worked but not en-UK or en-GB.

Apple has a country code, the app name and a numeric id. But the app name is just decoration and is ignored, so you could easily mislead by putting in anything you want. From the country code it looks like they believe only one language is spoken in any country (eg I couldn't select between French and English for Canada). The ids aren't in numeric order - probably some sort of timestamp instead.

Google uses a descriptive URL without country or language parts, and then the app is identified by package name (bundle id equivalent for the iOS crowd) which looks fine to us techie folk and mostly follows being the DNS name with some extra gunk such as com.rovio.angrybirdsspace.ads

Amazon Android URLs are amazon.com/<App Title>/dp/<ID> where the app title is just decoration and can be changed to anything and ID is hexadecimal(ish).

They all have various issues. I think locale information as part of the URI path is silly. Titles in the URLs is nice but open up social engineering attacks. As a techie I like the Google approach of identification, but that too is prone to social engineering (to my knowledge they do not verify a correspondence to the publishing organization DNS). But it is prettier than random numbers. A GUID is Microsoft's hammer and solution to everything. In this case it just makes the URLs unnecessarily long.

jimueller2• 14 years ago

I disagree that the long URL is a problem because I don't see people typing in mobile app store URLs. Either they search on the name or click a link. I do agree that it would be nice to have an app name that matters somewhere in the URL.

rogerbinns3• 14 years ago

I'm betting you are on iOS :-)

Links come from all over the place such as email and websites. I hope people have got into the habit of checking links before clicking on them!

In any event on Android from a web browser not on your device you can go to the Play store web site and install apps on your device.

It looks like you can do the same thing if you are on a system that has iTunes installed for iOS although it is more clicks and possibly involves cables.

AshleysBrain• 14 years ago

Microsoft have always had a funny habit of using GUIDs for everything.

roxtar• 14 years ago

To me it looks like when they published their app from the US, they got all valid reasons for a rejection. The fact that Toshl's app was present for an year with all these faults is not a good argument for being automatically accepted.

facorreia2• 14 years ago

Remember it was first published under local Microsoft's own account. It probably wasn't even subject to the same review process.

ChrisNorstrom• 14 years ago

Windows might not be worth it for most developers. But it can be very worth while for a few.

Some months ago we had someone post how well their app was doing on Windows Marketplace vs Android's and Apple's simply because there's so little competition. In Apple and Andriod's marketplaces their app was just one out of thousands but it was so much easier to find and advertise on Windows' Marketplace that the Windows phone sold the most units of all 3. Their windows phone app made the developer more money than the other 2 combined.

So it all depends on what you're developing and who your target market is. Despite the tiny market share and other problems, Windows Phone users aren't app-phobic. They want apps too.

I am envious of your patience and persistence. However, I'm confused about your refusal to censor yourself.

Rather than get rid of unnecessary syncing messages referring to sex toys you instead refused to publish the app in China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iraq, United Arab Emirates? All because you didn't want to censor yourself? Who are you trying to impress? You're a business, not a freedom fighter. You're preventing people in other countries from enjoying your app. Why punish the people of a country based on the controlling manipulative laws their politicians put in place. Everyone's country is imperfect.

LancerSykera• 14 years ago

Chris, I think you missed the part that they don't know why the app is considered immoral. They're just making a guess that it's that particular message. If they take it out, and the app is still immoral, then what?

yen2233• 14 years ago

I can't speak for other countries, but for Malaysia, that sentence alone probably won't get the app into any trouble.

I have a feeling this is a case of somebody at Microsoft erring too much on the side of caution.

gjulianm2• 14 years ago

Not the exact thing you're talking about:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/30/why-kik-loves-windows-phone...

From the post: Kik, a developer of cross-platform mobile communication apps, says something really strange happened when they launched their Windows Phone 7 application last June: user growth across the iOS and Android platform both accelerated significantly.

bringking• 14 years ago

I have to agree. I have published 12 apps on Windows Phone and ported 2 to Android and 1 to iOS, and my experience has been exactly that. There is less competition for small developers. My apps are not earth shattering or new in any way, I was just learning how to code and thought it would be cool to try and earn a few extra dollars doing it. The one app I have that is available on all three platforms did substantially better on Windows Phone. In numbers, I got about 1500 to 2000 ad impressions a day for 6-7 months on wp7 which has settled down to about 500 a day after 1.2 years. Android has been consistent at around 1000 a day for 4 months, however the pay out from ad mob vs microsoft pubcenter has been dramatically less. As for iOS, it hit about 2000 impressions the first day and has dive bombed since then. Now steady at about 300 a day. Interestingly it pays the most and the clicks on the ads are massively higher than Android. Like 50 clicks per 300 impressions. I think on iOS the user as so many more options, why would they open my app? If I was a large shop, I would take that into consideration. For reference, the app is called Critter Cards- Toddler if anyone is interested.

siger2• 14 years ago

Not impressed by this rant. The author admits some of the problems also happened on the App Store, and complains MS won't help them promote the app at this time. The reasons for which the udpated app was rejected at first seem valid to me (though specific info should have been given for the inappropriate content...).

Is it really expected that a developer should be able to move an app between accounts? Were they not aware of the limited audience of WP users? This should not come as a surprise after the second version of their app is done.

I will however agree the publishing portal is poorly implemented.

dnuggets• 14 years ago

Horrible article. As someone who has created and published a Windows Phone app before, let me say that it is a pretty smooth experience. Developing with C#/Silverlight is a breeze, and MS has a good developer portal set up. The majority of the problems described in the article sound like the fault of the developer, not Microsoft. If an app ever gets rejected during the submission process, they list out all the reasons why it was rejected, along with the parts of their guidelines which detail out the rules.

Also, "the page is confusing and the statistics poor"? I don't understand how you could get confused by anything in the developer page. And how are download numbers from any desired time range considered poor statistics?

It's frustrating that an article like this could get so much attention on HN. If you want to have a nightmare of a time developing apps, try developing for BlackBerry. Or deal with Apple's multi-week process of app submissions.

CWIZO2• 14 years ago

Have you even read the article? Most of the problems they had was because Microsoft refuses to acknowledge my country. And there exists Microsoft Slovenia FFS!

Also he clearly describes what's wrong with Silverlight and app submission form (can't use space, only works in Safari, etc).

He also said that they didn't get any specific reasons as to why the app was rejected.

the0x2• 14 years ago

Maybe it was rejected because your 'quip' sounds like your scanning a users data for juice?

cloudier• 14 years ago

I agree that this article probably wasn't the best but it does describe major problems for developers of Windows apps, many of which weren't the fault of the developers: they couldn't obtain a developer account simply because Microsoft doesn't allow for it in their country, and Microsoft additionally doesn't have the 'technical ability' to move apps from one account to another which would solve a lot of the issues that the developer describes. Also, the developer states that they weren't told specifically which parts of the app were considered 'immoral', and they didn't exactly have plenty of time to fix the app - their app had already been unavailable to their users for a month. Up to this point, their experience with Windows is similar to Apple's, but the fact that their efforts at promoting their app were thwarted pissed them off, especially after their previous bad experiences. Because of all this, your comment gives the impression that you hadn't read the post.

Why do you find developing for BlackBerry and Apple worse?

tluyben24• 14 years ago

Can you point out which apps you created and published?

mkramlich• 14 years ago

Link title should add "in Slovenia". It's more accurate, and it will save HNers time by giving a clue as to probable major contributor to the issues experienced.

jsnell• 14 years ago

Sorry, but that's just totally wrong. They had 1 or 2 issues caused by being a Slovenian company (not being allowed to publish apps, and the inability to switch the owner of an app). All the other complaints would apply to any new developer.

- Even after registering a US company they couldn't make an account for it, even with a US credit card.

- The certification process was horribly broken. The app had already been approved once, but now it suddenly got into a vortex of rejections. One reason at the time, rather than an up front list with everything wrong with it.

- They report the publishing tools as being crap.

- Microsoft just fucked over their WP7 developers and users by making sure that WP7 apps can't get any visibility in the app store.

That last point should be particularly chilling. Some people have argued that the horribly mishandled WP7->WP8 migration isn't that big a deal for existing WP7 users. They'd say that developers will continue targeting WP7 for everything except games that need native code, or apps that need hardware features like NFC. Well, clearly it's not so. If you want an app to have any visibility, you'll need to target Windows 8.

(This also looks like yet another giant middle finger directed at Nokia. They're going to be forced to sell WP7 on low end phones for years, since the minimum hardware specs of WP8 are just too high at the moment. And now it becomes clear that MS is actively trying to drive developers off these devices onto the non-existing ones.)

errnoh• 14 years ago

To be honest the app itself looks rather awesome.

Not sure what's the best way to generate users on WP but I do hope you get enough users and continue to support the platform.

Probably one of the most aesthetic apps on WP7, I for one will be using this from now on.

msh• 14 years ago

Its not true when they write: World outside the few largest markets does not exist

I am from denmark (hardly a large market) and had no problems creating a dev account and publishing apps but they are correct that not supporting as many countries as apple or google is wierd, but in the beginning android did not want to sell apps to danes either.

Metrop0218• 14 years ago

So I posted an app in the market place that got rejected the first time because I didn't include a privacy policy. I forget how much detail was included in the feedback when they told me this but it didn't take long for me to fix it and resubmit it. While I will agree it'd be nice if they sped the process up, its not slower than the competitions and it seems be about on par. Being on par isn't great though, and they should seek to excel and be better than apples process. Not sure how much that would help but its definitely a place to start. Anyways I'll be releasing another major update for my app soon so we'll see how it goes.

ginko• 14 years ago

Walking barefoot on broken glass actually isn't that hard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQIVPonHhx8#t=7m59s

alexeiz• 14 years ago

What's "Windows Phone" and why should anyone care?

mihahribar• 14 years ago

VP of Windows Phone at Microsoft just responded to the article in the comments. Looks like the blogpost made quite a splash.

Why Publishing on the Windows Phone is Like Walking Barefoot On Broken Glass

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