Windows 8 Store: with 99 Metro Apps, is it Behind Schedule?

The Windows 8 store isn't even open for developer submission yet, seems a little early to compare size or quality.

I imagine once we see a Release Candidate and the store open it will be a different story, but still far too early.

Here's a post about the process of getting into the store in the future.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jaimer/archive/2012/04/19/wanted-gre...

Well, how many iPad apps were available on the iTunes store 6 months before the iPad was released?

It's not due to a lack of developers. Microsoft developer evangelists and MVPs are out on the road holding Windows 8 developer camps. We had 100 people at mine and it was "sold out" quickly. At our camp an evangelist said Microsoft was being /very/ picky about what they allowed in the store now. What's neat about Microsoft is that they said that if you think you have an app that is really ready for the store now, just get in touch with a developer evangelist and they'll help you out.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/edvangelist/archive/2012/03/28/windo...

The Win8 Store isn't even open to all submissions at this point. Microsoft has only issued a handful of keys to selected developers, which allows them to submit apps. Without this key, you can't even make a developer account.

If you don't have a key, you can still develop Metro apps with VS 2011 Beta and test them using the Windows app certification utility that's included to see if the app would hypothetically pass.

I suppose this limits the growth of the Win8 Store at first, but I'm still surprised that there are only 99 apps given how many keys were issued. Also, I believe Microsoft is funding the development of apps by some popular app developers for iOS and Android.

This seems to be a very poor comparison, remarkably so in fact. You are comparing a new ecosystem to that of one which required absolutely no change (and in fact, is still dominated by applications built/designed for an iPhone, but stretch miserably to work on iPads).

There are lots of legitimate challenges that Windows faces with this push, and lots of interesting interactions between these issues, but you fail to outline any of them.

To the many posters who have not yet written application for Windows 8, let me assure you that for the vast majority of applications which are currently available on Windows, building the application using the new SDK will not only be quicker, but also have much better products. You can also import almost all of your old codebase, the main changes are with respect to asynchronous IO, which creates a hugely different user experience, and of course poses difficulties to developers who are less accustomed.

@Patrick Moorhead, is there any logic behind your choice of 5K as the number of applications? It seems to have come out of the blue, and not from any analysis.

Excuse me if I seem critical, I guess coming from HackerNews I was expecting comments and insight.

100s of thousands of App Store items comprise largely of crap than appears to be there only to push the app counter where it needs to be for Apple's marketing purposes. If Microsoft is to release a two-click FartApp build wizard, I'm sure they'll manage to catch up quite quickly.

In other words, I have this faint sliver of hope that Microsoft will get their App Store right, in which case I'd gladly take a set of 99 decent apps over Apple's wide selection of abysmality.

These type of doom and gloom speculation articles are completely unnecessary. We're 5 months out and given that MS has stated that all WP8 apps will run on Win8, they're looking at ~100K apps in some form out of the gate.

There's definitely a tipping point here. As a mobile developer with my own successful iPad apps I am watching this situation very closely. If it looks like WM8 will get traction then I will scramble to be one of the first 1000 or so developers to join Microsoft's ecosystem. However, if WM8 flops on tablets as badly as Android did (or: has so far) then I'll be glad I saved my energy.

Android has 32,000 apps for tablets? That's very nice if true (plus all the phone apps). I don't have a tablet, but I haven't heard of many updates on this, and I thought the situation for tablet apps was a lot worse.

So then Windows 8 for tablets will come way behind both Android and the iPad when it launches, just like it happened with WP7. Things don't look so good for Microsoft right now.

While bad news for Microsoft, it's hard not to think about how much exposure you as an app-developer would get in a store with only a hundred (or even a thousand) apps.

This may be incentive enough to have a lot of developers creating apps during the coming months (and ironically removing this incentive in the process).

Just release the compiler for native code, and you would see a change.