WP8 SDK Finally Available

You can now get your WP8 SDK from VS2012.  It is available and will take up to 5G of space.  Go to the VS2012 project for Windows Phone 8 and it will give you a button to start the downloading.  Looks like it will create both WP7.5 and WP8 apps. 

WP8 Download

More App Store Discussions

From my last post, a few people pointed out that the Windows 8 app store is also a tablet store and so it should be compared to the iPad store as well.  And since the iPad store is also the iOS store, you should compare the two.

I beg to differ on this point.  Just because an app can run on an iPad because it can run iPhone specific apps, I personally think that those should not count.  I agree that any iPad or Universal app should count when you are looking at the two stores. 

Here you can see that the iPad specific store is similar to the Mac store.  The launch dates and the number of apps are different.

iPad App Store

1. Launched April 2010 with 3,000 apps
2. July 2011 reported to have 100,000 apps (16 months)
3. Apple takes 30% of sales
4. $100 a year to be in the store
5. Does not allow : beta, demo, trial or test versions of software
6. Does not allow : content that has content or services that expire
7. Does not allow : software only licensed under GPL

Most of what I had talked about previously is still the same.  From a developer/OEM side, the Windows store looks a lot better.  Many apps in the iPad and iOS stores are a free version and then a paid version of the same basic app.  This is a marketing tool that many iOS developers use.  They flood the market with similar apps instead of having trial/paids apps because Apple does not support that.  I would rather see as a consumer a better choice of quality apps instead of a market filled with 20+ sound effect apps that are all really the same app from the same developer.  I give those guys credit for figuring out how to be successful in the iOS store, but this just points out to a flaw in the store itself.

App Store Race - MS the winner??

I was looking at an article on The Register and they were comparing the Windows 8 App store and Apples iOS App store.  Microsoft has over 3,000 apps (which 1 is mine) and iOS store has over 650,000 (11 are mine).  This got me to thinking that this is actually bad journalism and that things are not being reported correctly.  The true comparison to new Windows Store is actually the Mac App Store, not the iOS one.  So here is a comparison of the 2 desktop app stores.

Mac App Store

1. Launched January 6, 2011 with 1,000 apps
2. May 2012 reported to have 10,000 apps
3. Apple takes 30% of sales
4. $100 a year to be in the store
5. Does not allow : beta, demo, trial or test versions of software
6. Does not allow : content that has content or services that expire
7. Does not allow : software only licensed under GPL

Windows Store

1. Launching October 26, 2012 with over 3,000 apps
2. Microsoft takes 30% of sales, but over $25k in sales it drops to 20%
3. $100 a year to be in the store, but free if you have an MSDN account
4. Has a built in trial mode for apps
5. In-App purchases allow for purchases to expire (think like a magazine subscription)
6. Allows open source software.  Link: ExtremeTech 

As a developer I look at both stores, Microsoft is launching with over 3x the number of apps that Apple did.  Even after over a year, there are only around 10,000 Mac apps in the store and Microsoft is launching with over 1/3 of that.  I can see that the number after a year will be a lot higher than 10,000.

Also as someone that is developing apps for mobile and tablets, I personally like the idea that I can have a trial app and then people can just purchase it and then they have the full one.  Right now I have some iOS apps where I have to maintain a free version and a paid version and rev both of them when a new SDK is out or new things that I want to put in.  Having a single app is very appealing to me.  I know that some of the iOS developers actually use this to their advantage to put out multiple versions of a single app - this one does animal sounds, this one does English voices, etc and then flood the category with multiple free and paid versions of each.  In the Microsoft store, this could be a single app with in-app purchases for each different thing.  Easier to maintain and enhance.  A friend of mine has close to 80 iOS apps and many of them are very similar like this.  But to me, submitting updates for all 80 would be very tedious. 

As far as reporting that Apple has over 650,000 apps compared to Microsoft's 3,000 apps, be careful on how you read stories like that.  Are they comparing apples to apples (no pun intended) or are they comparing apples to pumpkins? 

Microsoft will have more apps in the store at launch time than Apple did.  Microsoft is making it easier for the app developers to get people to try their apps with the trial/buy method built into the SDK.  Microsoft is taking less money after you start making a good amount.  Microsoft is supporting the open source movement better than Apple.  Microsoft is giving store developer accounts to people with MSDN subscriptions for free, where Apple will make sure that you pay for it.

Desktop App Store Winner -- Microsoft

Now go make some more apps for the store.