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Comment by ssully | Hacker News Reader

I was going to chime in a little on it being a stretch. One of the promotions for students they did was near the summer of 2012 or 2013. The promotion was you got paid 100 dollars for every app published on the Microsoft store limit 5 for the mobile store and 5 for the regular store. So a total limit of $1000. My school actually had a Microsoft rep run a workshop over a weekend showing students how to publish an app on the store. He gave us a template for a number of apps to "test" with. I made about $300 that weekend by publishing 3 different variants of a wackamole game. The workshop I attended had about 25 students total and we all left publishing at least one app. Idk how wide spread this outreach was. I checked on my apps sometime last year and they were all still up. I ended up pulling them out of a mix of shame and embarrassment.

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I was a student who had won a Lumia 800 around May of 2012. There was a promotion where anyone who submitted 4 apps to the appstore would get a phone - no 'win' involved, a guaranteed phone. It was one of the best promotions I'd ever seen, and I promptly churned out 4 soundboard apps in a week.

This is unfortunately true, but it isn't representative of the entire effort put forth to acquire apps. I was part of the Microsoft org who was doing this at the time. We were split between breadth engagements (one to many like at universities or hackathons) and depth engagements (one to one). I was working depth engagements helping established companies port existing iOS and Android apps to Windows. The amount of investment from Microsoft in those depth engagements ranged from me helping out with technical barriers for a couple days to hundreds of thousands of dollars in incentives and development effort. It was all about how desirable that name or brand was on other platforms.

Did everything they could...

Ah, yes. $100 per app. I'm sure that's what most apps cost to produce. /s

It seems like they did a few things, but never actually, you know, paid app developers to build out their ecosystem.

Hey, if you're optimizing for "number of apps on our store" I bet it worked great!

Why spend $100,000 developing something one app when you could get 1000 for the same price?!

Instead of paying per app, would make more sense to let devs keep 90% of store revenue, which would incentivize the development of apps that are actually popular and make money.

Hell, let developers keep 100% of store revenue, at least until you have a customer base.

It's not much worse for MS than 90%, and it makes a much nicer marketing story if you're trying to convince developers to get on your platform.

It was a slight eye opener for me as a student at the time getting near graduation. The part of the workshop going through the app submittal and approval process was actually really interesting, but when it became clear that the bigger effort was to boost app numbers in the store things felt really dirty.

Either way that experience always comes up for me whenever people talk about the low quality of apps on the Windows store.

> "We have millions more apps than the competition."

> leaves out the fact that 99% of them are either web wrappers or low quality games

This is why we have confounding factors, kids.

Even with paying out this money for shovelware they never matched up to Apple's app store numbers.

I had a Surface Pro 3 at the time and there were maybe 10 apps worth using on a touchscreen. Eventually gave up and sold it to get a Mac and iPad.

They tried that too. The Verge reported in 2013 that Microsoft was paying some developers $100,000 each to port their apps to Windows Mobile. The article hints that was how Pandora & Temple Run ended up on Windows Mobile.

https://www.theverge.com/2013/6/15/4433082/microsoft-paying-...

That's probably where those ads on Craigslist coding gigs come from.

"I'll pay you $100 or split the equity for my cool new app idea!"

That certainly wasn't the only program. MSFT paid cost for my mobile dev company to port games, because we had an established brand on iOS/Android. $100 for whatever random college students come up with seems very reasonable.

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