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W10 Store Feature

When Microsoft launched Windows ten eight months ago, it made a point of telling developers that it was working to improve the capabilities and usefulness of the Windows 10 Store. Whatsoever the company did, information technology apparently wasn't enough, and ane longtime Windows dev is calling for a cold-shoulder of the storefront until Microsoft fixes it.

According to Nikolaus Gebhardt, programmer of the open up-source 3D engine Irrlicht, the Windows x Shop's search office is cleaved, well-nigh to the point of being useless. Gebhardt'southward recent web log mail service describes how sales of his diverse Windows applications, which were already low, have gone to nearly zero under Windows 10. He writes:

You lot cannot find my apps anywhere in the app shop. Unless you know the verbal name of my app, you won't detect it. Y'all can type any of the keywords my apps have in their title, description or fifty-fifty in the list of keywords submitted to the store, and it won't list my apps. Instead, the app shop will simply listing two or three other, useless apps. In total. Judging from the developer forums, there are many other developers with this problem. When contacting Microsoft nigh this, they obviously sent the other developers a prewritten text, saying basically that "they have no control over the search results shown in the store."

The response to Gebhardt's post proves he's non alone. Numerous devs accept reported that their applications can merely be plant if you search for the precise name of the app. Another reported apps vanishing from the Windows 10 Mobile and Windows Phone 8 store. Developers have been asking Microsoft to accost these issues for months, but the company is stonewalling both publications and the devs themselves.

BusinessInsider reached out to Microsoft to inquire about the problem and was handed a boilerplate response that boiled down to "Read this blog post and follow its instructions to ensure your app will be surfaced in search results." None of the recommended tips seem applicative to the issues developers are having, particularly when information technology comes to keyword searches that should return relevant results and merely don't.

Why the Windows Store matters

In theory, the Windows Store is the linchpin that ties the entire Windows ecosystem together. Consumers who want Universal apps that are guaranteed to work beyond phones, tablets, computers, and even the Xbox Ane are supposed to get them from the Windows Shop. And Microsoft has been searching for new revenue streams since it launched Windows 10.

Discoverability has been a major problem for both Apple and Google, just Microsoft has a theoretical advantage in that location, in that the majority of PC users have devices with much larger screens; it should be easier to surface applications when the user has more space to consider their options. Bing only has a fraction of Google's search volume, simply Microsoft notwithstanding owns a fully functional search engine. It shouldn't be this hard to help people find useful applications, just plain, information technology is.

Microsoft's app ecosystem is a fraction the size of what Apple or Google manage. In theory, that should make it the best platform to surface great content. In practice, killer apps tend to make a splash on iOS or Android and transition to Windows at a much later date, if at all. We've previously criticized Microsoft for the vast numbers of terrible applications that filled the Windows Store, and balancing the need to weed out garbage versus limiting legitimate developers is difficult to do. If these complaints are any indication, however, Microsoft has yet to find its feet. Until it does, developers may have even less reason to write lawmaking for Redmond's platform than ever.