toshl.com
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.
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.
I find I usually click on App URLs from sites like Engadget, that I trust.
Can you get an install to happen to your device when going to a Windows Marketplace page on a desktop (without tethering your device etc)?
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.
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.
Why do you find developing for BlackBerry and Apple worse?
Windows Phone is a flop. It may be good (I wouldn't know). But it is demonstrably not popular.
Either it'll eventually take off, or else either Apple or Google will copy all the good ideas and I'll switch back. Either way works for me, frankly.
(Well, no, that's not entirely true. I'd prefer it take off next year and Nokia survives intact, because nobody else is making hardware that isn't hopelessly bland looking.)
Anyway; what do you find fantastic about it?
I greatly prefer the look of the tiles to the widgets/apps mismatch on the home page. And the ability to be able to pin so many different things to the home page from inside of apps, instead of going to a separate "add widgets" section, is very useful... I don't have to think about "oh I should see if this app has a widget I can pin."
I've found the Skydrive Office integration to work much better than the Google Docs app Google provided for Android. Faster loading, better controls, and the ability to pin stuff to the start page with ease. OneNote is also the best note management app on a phone I've ever used.
I really like how they did the "people hub" thing of centralizing all the info/connections you have about someone in one place. (Though it's annoying that the messaging app doesn't support FB "messages", just FB "chat", so I also have the FB app installed in case someone sends me one of those.)
The overal design language is great. (For a good example of a third party app getting it, compare the Android Weatherbug app's UI with the WP7 version.)
I really prefer the use of vertical scrolling on the home page to swiping left/right to get to other home pages—I always forgot about stuff that wasn't on the home page with Android, and find a quick flick to scroll down my whole home page a much better way of seeing everything I want in front of me.
And in my case, it's been far more stable than my Evo ever was.
My biggest complaint is that the gmail client isn't as good.
The email client (the native one; i'm not sure if you mean another one?) is horrible. And that's one of the things I cannot wrap my head around; this is the company who makes the most sold email client/server software in the world right? The native email client is simply buggy and when used as gmail highly instable (I have over 100.000 mails in my inbox; it just crashes randomly). I drank the gmail koolaid and i'm used to it now; I never throw away and I don't use folders. The WP email client really doesn't like that...
About space inefficience, with Metro I can see at a glance the most important things. You know, less information density -> more focus.
For me, the best features are fluidness (I still see last generation Android phones which are laggy), the live tiles are great to have all the information at a glance, and I really love the Metro design. Also, the deep integration with Twitter and Facebook makes it a really good system.
I think the Sony Ericsson lineup from 2011 was quite pretty and managed to differentiate themselves quite well from the bland Android crowd. Even the hit Samsung phones are quite ugly in my opinion.
It's all subjective, though, but I still like my phones small.
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.
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.
But in a finance app? Not okay. If I'm trusting this company's app to manage my finances, they should show a professional level of distance and respect, and not have some robot joking about my sex life. It's personal, it's potentially insulting, and it's in a context where this kind of subject should be left alone.
And that's saying nothing of the fact that in countries like Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Qatar, people are probably not anywhere near as open about sexuality as we are in the United States and Europe. If you want to market a product in those countries you should respect that.
They should. But here's the problem: the subset of things that offend any country in the world, is the superset.
And the cultural and moral values applied, are not 'international'. They are extremely American. And some of the things it outlaws, may be a crucial part of the identity of another culture.
There are cultures that consider females not wearing a headscarf, to be offensive. There are cultures that treat blood (even in cartoon form) like the US would treat a nipple, like Germany. There are cultures, that will be offended, just because the store is open on Sunday.
I live in Holland. We consider Apple's App Store to represent Christian fundamentalism. That's how we call that set of moral values.
Apple risks getting sued for discimination and 'promoting hate', by publishing those guidelines. I wonder what they'll do, when they see that reaction.
The government was pissed, and considering legislation because the fact the app was not allowed was considered to be offensive. The app is allowed now, as an 18+ app.
And honestly, thats what we should do. Sue, legislate and full out war of the whole concept of these kind of policies. Stores playing culture police sounds like part of a dysotopian nightmare.
And the rules are so so so American. Sex is bad. Violence is good. Lying about products is allowed, but oh dear if kids get to see a niple.
The weird thing is, i doubt Apple realizes just how offensive their guidelines are themselves. Ah well, thell have their day in court.
So what you are saying is that if it's not offensive to you then clearly everyone else is wrong?
edit: i'm trying to explain what about it offends me. I guess that it's making assumptions about my sexuality which is pretty personal, or making light of my sexuality which is pretty important.
As an aside, the devil thing isn't isolated to non-Western countries either. Linda Branagan famously recalls one instance of where the BSD "Daemon" mascot, which also looks devil-like, nearly got her into real trouble in Texas: http://rmitz.org/freebsd.daemon.html
Me: ``Oh, well, see, this isn't really the devil, it's just, well, it's sort of a mascot.''
Native: ``And what kind of football team has the devil as a mascot?''
I call BS.
College mascots that are devils, off the top of my head: - Duke Blue Devils - Arizona Sun Devils - Dusty, from a branch of Texas A&M
All of which have been there for decades.. and since Duke and Arizona are regular NCAA champion contenders, it wouldn't be a surprise.
On the other hand, our newspapers regularly publish raunchier content without much fanfare.
It's a fascinating place really.
Who goes to concerts? Younger people. Who reads newspapers? Older people.
The result is that Malaysia has a large enough non-Muslim population to avoid becoming a full-blown theocracy like Saudi Arabia, but still have a large enough religious base to be considered a 'conservative' country.
Yes, god forbid they do it because they know any better, because of experience and such...
Check your theory again in 20 years.
However, if that's the case, the review team should point that out, specifically.
@
Compete
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.
I have a feeling this is a case of somebody at Microsoft erring too much on the side of caution.
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.
I think that is a fair summary.
Big corp doesn't have nice ways of changing shit, this isn't specific to M$.
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.
iPhone and Android app stores are well-worn paths for hundreds of thousands of developers world wide - right or wrong?
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.
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.
- 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.)