This isn’t super surprising. Microsoft is desperate to get people to develop for the Windows platform and this obviously an incentive that developers will find attractive.
This actually aligns incentives really well. If the user came to you because of the marketing you directly did, you don't pay much more than if you had organised the sale directly on your website.
But Microsoft is incentivised to attract people to buying apps through their shop experience directly, and if they do, they get rewarded for it. These are customers that you might not otherwise have attracted yourself, so it's not unreasonable to pay a higher amount for them.
I think it's a really great model and I wish that other stores would adopt it.
[1]https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-is-apparently-cancelin...
[2]if your app is 1) not a "game", 2) not on xbox or win8, and 3) not purchased in the "for business" or "for education" store
They have completely different ToS.
They've rebranded the Xbox Store and Windows Store to both just be the Microsoft Store and content you purchase them (e.g. Movies, Music, TV) is shared between the two. Some Games are "Xbox Play Anywhere" which means you can play them on Windows 10 or Xbox (e.g. Forza Horizon 4) but others are exclusive to either platform (e.g. Flight Simulator). Some games can be purchased for either platform individually (e.g. Halo).
Then you have the weirdness that Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 is published by Xbox Game Studios but only available on Windows 10.
Oddly enough, part of the unpopularity of the windows store comes from frequent reports of instability in the performance of the windows store software. You would think the world's biggest software company could figure out how to create a digital store that's as stable as their competition, but apparently they cannot.
Steam has longetivity. MS stores mean that you rent the product for maybe 5 years or bit more.
On Linux we just have the WorksOnMyMachine certification, which is accordingly crowdsourced.
And no, no one finds the Windows store attractive.
(italics added for emphasis)
Note that Microsoft is not backing Epic in their court case against Apple, because that would be quite the glass house given the xbox (which is a 70/30 split, with virtually identical restrictions as the App Store). Instead they are merely backing them for the injunction to prevent Epic from losing immediate access to development tools.
As I understand it, though, there's little motivation to sell software on Android versus iOS right now due to the relative lack of sales (that is, iOS users consistently spend more an applications than Android users). I doubt there'd be much incentive to invest in an app store infrastructure on Android right now given the poor expected return (going off of my recollection, Amazon's app store has not done particularly well, what would differentiate MS's from Amazon's right now?). But if you could have the same app store on both iOS and Android, you'd place yourself in a much more compelling position (for users and developers).
And since iOS users have demonstrated a willingness to part with their money for software, it's a better target for companies like MS, Steam, Epic, and others than Android (or Android alone).
Smaller the player, smaller the market, less they have restrictions.
That being said, this isn't the underdogs vis big players. These are big players, taken on other bigger players, and just kinda incidentally helping a lot of the smaller players ... for now .. but this could just as easily turn again if one of them gets back on top.
What is the relation of the SCO lawsuit to Microsoft?
There's a giant gulf between Apple's tyrannical platform and the rest of the world.
Not really
https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/unsigned.html
It's time to stop being Apple apologists. We're engineers and these are our devices.
Apple has no right to fence in our entire industry as a walled garden. It wasn't like this until their grubby behavior with the iPhone. They're clearly taking Mac in that direction.
We have to band together to stop them.