Just about the only complaint I hear from from WP users is that it doesn't have the apps they would like to use. If MS could prove that their phones had similar app support that Android and iPhones have many more people would be open to using them.
The MS app store is flooded with so many cheap, quickly developed apps and knockoffs that finding anything good not simply produced by MS itself requires wading through stuff that's bad.
Could be I'm biased, refusing to buy anything I feel I could just make myself, but I can imagine as an app developer who actually tried to make money, developing for a platform where the margins are so low and the copying so easy probably doesn't provide much incentive.
MS even approved for sale, a fake Windows 8.1 update. That's how poorly it's handled.
Here's some pics to show the crap: http://imgur.com/a/xvqZg#0
Fake Windows Update: http://imgur.com/FOC0jr5
Contacting MS is useless. In the case of the fake Dropbox app, the MS CSR said it worked fine and I should try reinstalling this. This is regarding an obvious fake/scam/phishing app.
Even legit publishers are finding it hard to get pirate copies of their apps removed. If you look at the top paid apps, some of them are media players, rebundling things like K-Like Codec Pack (at least in name). Pretty much any popular title will have plenty of fakes going around.
MS prioritizes one metric alone: number of apps published. The store is filled with useless shit and is an embarrassment. As a user, it makes the Store difficult to use. And even after you get through the outright scams, the overall quality is pretty terrible. Just poor UI, janky software.
It's a shame, because the MS dev tools are really fantastic, and the frameworks look great.
If Windows 10 has any significant uptake and given that its integrated search is the machine, the web AND the app store, I would think they would curate just to improve peoples search result quality, to try and avoid given the feature a negative image.
But for most people, supporting an additional platform for any duration more than a year can quickly cost upwards of that amount. With the tiny marketshare today, and nothing but hope that it will ever grow - hope that has not come to fruition in 3-5 years - it will be a net loss very quickly and also have diverted resources from the other aspects of the developer's companies.
If they could perhaps offer scalable incentives, like "support and consulting services worth $2000 per month" or "we pay you $0.05 per download (even if your app is free)" or "we'll market your app alongside WP marketing" then perhaps. Perhaps it might be functional developer incentive.
Disclaimer/note: As a cofounder of a company built around an app that Microsoft tried to woo us to port. We toyed with their APIs for a bit, but it was going to be a support nightmare with our hardware and sensor requests and we decided against following through.