Hacker News Reader

Comment by sylens | Hacker News Reader

The current state of the Windows Store is a holdover from the early 2010's where "number of apps in our app store" became a huge KPI and something for the CEO to tout to the board of directors. Apple and Google kept bragging about these numbers at their respective developer conferences/yearly refresh unveilings and therefore Microsoft was all too happy to accept any and all apps into the Windows Store at the time in an attempt to appear relevant.

Times have changed, though, and you could argue that now many people would like less app clutter and easier discoverability of the apps they actually want. What end user is benefitting from all these carpetbagger apps squatting on Firefox's brand? I don't know what the policy or action looks like to clean this up without instituting heavy hand moderation of the Windows Store but I feel like something has to be done. The way it is now is unsustainable if you want the store to have any value at all.

View on HN

Not just bragging about it, Microsoft was paying people to submit software to pump that number up:

> In a new US marketing effort, Microsoft is offering developers $100 per app for newly published applications submitted to the Windows Phone Store or the Windows Store by June 30th. Developers can net $2,000 in total by submitting up to 10 apps to each store.

https://www.theverge.com/2013/3/19/4124548/microsoft-paying-...

I expect some of its current shovelware still dates back to those efforts.

Back in the Windows Phone days, they'd send you a phone for developing an app. I wrote a crappy calculator app during a CS class and got a free phone out of it.

I spent more time doing the app submission than I did writing the app. They didn't care what it was. Similarly Blackberry had a similar program a little while later where I just ported the same app and got a Playbook tablet.

It was fun as a poor college kid, but look where it got both of them.

I remember this period. I remember a few dozen devs I knew just submitted dumb/garbage apps and grabbed the bounty.

Don't think it helped the Windows Phone ecosystem at all because instead of a few decent apps, you now had to wade through hundreds of terrible apps and sometimes you'd get lucky and find a decent one.

> because instead of a few decent apps, you now had to wade through hundreds of terrible apps and sometimes you'd get lucky and find a decent one

Sounds like a perfect copy of Google Play.

Counterpoint: I got a free Amazon Echo (gen 1 echo, echo dot, echo show) for free by writing a few voice apps. Amazon has so ce cleaned up the lowest effort ones I made.

I could feel the submission process get tighter as time passed. I think the idea was to see what apps people come up with and what gains traction? Kind of like the story where the management lets people on the grass and paves a walkway on the most walked path?

It was the same on ios in the early days. My first app was a sound board. People paid money for it.

Customers paid money for it, Apple wasn't instructing people on how to build a soundboard and handing them a check or an iPhone for submitting it. Quite the opposite, all of those developers paid Apple $100 to join the developer program.

At a developer conference around that time they showed us step-by-step how to build several simple apps and then encouraged us to make our own variations of those apps to submit to the Windows Store. I remember thinking it was doomed to look as sad as the Blackberry app store.

Seriously. I knew of a few people in college who got that entire $2000 and paid off a few months of rent through that promotion by submitting quick one-off apps like calculators and snake games, and they did it with the encouragement of Microsoft reps on campus.

I was given a pretty decent free Windows phone after a hackathon by a Microsoft rep with basically no strings attached other than a verbal promise that if I ever finished the game I was working on during the Hackathon, I would put it on Windows store alongside any other platform.

They really wanted those numbers to go up.

> Times have changed, though, and you could argue that now many people would like less app clutter and easier discoverability of the apps they actually want.

Time and time again people & markets need to relearn this.

The "video game crash" in the early 80s that collapsed Atari was because of so much shovelware that came out (with the infamous E.T. game being seen as the "pinnacle" of that era). Nintendo emerged from that rubble by being more selective about the games they allowed [1] on their platform, something which Atari fought them on tooth and nail [2]. (The amount of shovelware games on mobile platforms is a tragic repeat of that era.)

One of the more memorable aspects of classic management classes like the case study of the Challenger Disaster is that you don't want more information, you want better information.

Google's mission statement remains to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." How are they doing on that these days? How's the Play Store compared to the Apple App Store or Microsoft's Windows Store?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIC_(Nintendo)

[2] https://youtu.be/fLA_d9q6ySs

There were many things I liked about the Windows Phone OS. The alphabetical listing UI is far better than what Android/iOS have. (in iOS you can jump to a specific letter with a precise tap along the side. In WP, you could tap on a letter to bring up a pop-over list of letters.. much easier!). Its keyboard was excellent. The navigation bar in the apps would be icons, but could be expanded to show labels for each of the icons. The home screen theming was excellent. The phones had a physical button for using the camera (until that restriction was lifted).

But, yeah, WP didn't have the apps people wanted to use.

I don't like that Apple's iOS is so locked down. Apparently even the App Store isn't free of clutter. -- It's concerning that the opposite (a complete lack of curation, and an encouragement to write apps) doesn't end up as a competitive phone OS.

Agree on all points. As a registered Windows Insider, I had Windows Phone 10 installed at beta, and as much as I liked the UI and behavior of the original Windows Phone, Windows Phone 10 was even better. I held onto that phone until the bitter end, then flopped over to Android. The Nokia Maps app was sufficient, I don't use much more than that. If Microsoft rebooted Windows Phone with support for the Android app store, I would be back on that in a heartbeat.

People that never used it will never understand, and people that did, will never forget.

I didn't like how locked down the Windows Phone OS was, even for the time, and I didn't like some of the limitations that popped up around app capabilities. But otherwise, agreed, they had some good UX ideas, I liked their interface a lot, there are concepts there that would still hold up really well today on a mobile OS. And it was certainly (imo) a lot nicer to develop on than Android.

But... yeah, the app ecosystem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com