Windows 8 store apps pass 20,000 mark, almost 18,000 are free | Hacker News Reader

Windows 8 store apps pass 20,000 mark, almost 18,000 are free

thenextweb.com

40 pointsReltair41 comments

I find the colored tiles in the store very difficult to skim through. https://twitter.com/TDUupdaterHD/status/271344469108989952/p...

In other app stores, the white background lets you navigate quickly, as a simple list with icons.

I know it's a tired cliche to bash Microsoft for poor UI design, but those small multi-color squares plus horizontal scrolling?

Wasn't there someone at some level in the company who could point out how unusable that is?

I know it's hard to conceive, but you might not be the target market. Microsoft probably has people testing these things. I have no trouble skimming it.

Testing won't necessarily help when there's a complete lack of design sensibility. Tests can be poorly framed and misinterpreted. This ui fails on basic ux and design principles.

Exactly. Even scrolling issues aside, how this is easier than black on white (with colored icons) is beyond me. Aesthetically, it looks like crap.

It is one of those things that can't be explained so well though.

"Microsoft probably has people testing these things."

It sure does. But what does Microsoft do with those recommendations?

The company had a group test the Kin devices, too. The group decided the devices were unusable, and Microsoft decided to launch them as-is anyways.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/11/unreleased-internal-m...

Actually they fixed the perf, which was the main complaint from those videos.

I actually have a Kin One and I really like it. The web browser kinda sucks because it's based on IE 6 but the messaging and actual phone parts are great and I love the UI.

From the article:

"These internal Microsoft videos, provided to Wired by a person who worked on the project, show focus groups testing the ill-fated Kin. According to our source, these are pre-production models that changed very little from the shipping product, although “performance improved some prior to shipping.” Watch them, and you can readily see why the project tanked: Kin phones just weren’t usable."

According to our source, these are pre-production models that changed very little from the shipping product, although “performance improved some prior to shipping.”

This is obviously not true by just watching the videos. In the videos the delay between typing a number on the keypad and it coming up is something like 5 seconds. Watch any hands-on video after it launched and you can see no performance issues like that. Kin reviews noted some performance issues, but nothing to the degree noted by these videos.

performance improved some prior to shipping

I think that would be an understatement given how poor the perf in these videos were. It would be like doing a test group on the iPhone where dragging and tapping was delayed by a few seconds. There's no reason to even test that, because it will break everything else in the UI.

Microsoft probably has people testing these things.

Without knowledge of the test conditions and methodology, this is a meaningless statement.

No more meaningless than declaring it unusable without that information.

A lot of people may not be in that "target market" for the Metro UI, and yet Microsoft is forcing it on anyone who might want to still use Windows in the future.

Huh? They're forcing it as much as they're forcing the UI of the desktop mode. What does that even mean anyway.

It means "I'm in the mood to bash Microsoft" and nothing more.

The scrolling isn't an issue. Not only is the expectation to scroll by touch, it also handles scrolling with a mouse just fine (scrolling down scrolls right, scrolling up scrolls left) and feels natural.

On a tablet, it's easier to swipe horizontally than vertically. I suspect that's the cause of this design decision.

Agree. But same design on my Windows 8 desktop. I can scroll with the mouse wheel, still somewhat a pain. :(

I wonder what made them abandon the familiar web page layout where you can scroll down, and there is even keyboard support for 'Page Up/Down'.

I came here to say this, too. On the Play Store and App Store, the combination of the icon and the name usually gives me a rough idea about the quality and purpose of the app. On the MS Store, all I see is colored rectangles and I really can't distinguish stuff.

Also, I feel like the other stores are far better searchable for some reason. Incidentally, is there a way to see the most popular apps of all categories? I can't seem to find that.

Or maybe I just haven't gotten used to it yet or no common marketing language has emerged yet.

It's really simple: this was designed by someone who hasn't actually tried to use the App Store more than a few times.

One thing I have noticed since I started doing Product is that there is no shortcut to simply using your product A LOT to do product well. A side effect is that I can generally get a feel abojt how much time someone spent using their own product because the more serious inefficiencies or features become universally obvious ... but after 10 or 50+ uses over a period of time.

Do the different colors even represent anything, or are they just chosen at random?

It looks like they're some average of the colors in the app's icon. That's what Windows 7/8 (and Vista?) do for the mouseover highlight color of taskbar items too, though more subtly, so it would make sense.

I haven't tried this yet, but I think the developers choose a store-tile color for their apps.

I think Microsoft needs to be careful about playing a numbers game here - even while what you hear quoted all the time about these app stores is numbers, it's the quality and depth of those apps that matters to the end users. Android has a decent number of tablet optimized apps now, but still not one of the half dozen word processors is what I would call high quality, and nearly all of them are ugly. What will make the platform - and what I believe made iOS such a winner on tablets - is that the apps people experienced delighted them. They were beautiful, extremely high quality, well performing. Things you wanted to show to your friends, and you wanted to pay for. I get a feeling Microsoft is very focused on inflating the store numbers, getting the widest coverage of apps they can on there. But if they are doing that at the expense of quality - so that consumer's first experience of the apps they try do not delight them - that will actually be the downfall of it.

Maybe quality is distributed naturally among apps. That would imply that a certain percentage of apps will always veer towards the high quality while a similar percentage will always be rubbish. This would mean that more apps equal more quality. I am inclined to believe in this, if only because natural distributions are so common.

(That said, it would be very interesting to compare means and standard deviations between app stores. Would they differ?)

Word processors - which one is good that isn't Microsoft Word, remind me?

OO is grotesque and slow.

Google docs, for the ease of simultaneous editing is fucking awesome (I just watched 4 people simultaneously update our Saturday thanksgiving meal spreadsheet), but the functionality is pretty basic and clumsy to access.

To be fair, Word isn't that great either. I spend a lot of time shouting at it and for about 95% of the things I do, Google Docs is absolutely fine and not tied to a specific computer. It has become my default word processor.

Yes. You have a point. It requires a lot of yelling.

I've just realised I like Excel, for what it is. I feel dirty. Maybe this week has been too long.

Everybody wants quality, but I don't see how giving an industry standard benchmark for web-stores put them at a competitive disadvantage. App count is how we compare stores. Lastly, I don't think anybody at MS takes the number as a 1:1 correlation between actual app numbers, and certainly not as a judgement of app quality.

So many free apps. There must be some secret I'm missing. My free apps that I've tried just haven't made as much as paid.

Note: I haven't made any games with consumable IAP. Other app types with upgrades and ad removal.

I would strongly suspect it means many of the apps were funded or sponsored by Microsoft?

Microsoft funded 20,000 apps? Really?

It wouldn't surprise me if they funded 5,000 at least. Why wouldn't you if you were in their shoes? I think not doing that was one of Google's greatest mistakes with Android.

How does this compare to the number of tablet-specific apps for Android?

Interesting point.

However, what I would really like to know is the number of non-trivial apps. Sadly, that is impossible to count. But every platform has its equivalent to fart apps that add no value to the platform whatsoever.

Does the free/paid ratio tells us (developer) that the windows8 app market will be more similar to Android than the apple app store?

On the other hand, Angry Birds Space and Star Wars are more expensive in the Windows Store than on the iOS App Store (though I only checked on my iPhone, not on my iPad), and a ton of the top iOS apps these days are free but make their money through in app purchases. At this point, I just assume that an app that's free on iOS is going to annoy me to death with in app purchase gameplay mechanics and nags.

It probably just means the quality of the apps are currently fairly low. Once there has been a bit more time for developers to create apps, the quality and the paid/free ratio will go up.

Very interesting point, the major differences in philosophy between OS X & iOS vs Windows & Android. Although I think Android still leans more towards the Apple side of things.

It will be interesting to see how the Windows App store evolves on both Windows 8 and Windows phone. Because that percentage of apps being free definitely won't be extremely profitable for developers. Especially if that's what users grow to expect.

In the iOS app store people spend a lot of time talking about the race to the bottom and how 99 cent apps are detrimental to people trying to make livings as independent developers. Imagine how much more difficult it could be when the race was to free.

I was thinking the same thing. The key to a vibrant app ecosystem is making profit for developers. Possibly these apps are making ad money, but yet to be seen.

Most of them are probably just reworked websites.

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