Windows Marketplace For Mobile Kill Switch Details

Posted by timothy on Saturday September 19, 2009 @05:41PM from the will-I-get-my-four-years-back? dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft recently gave more details on Windows Marketplace for Mobile during the Tech Ed New Zealand 2009 session titled 'Distributing and Monetizing Applications through Windows Marketplace Mobile,' led by Loke Uei Tan, Senior Product Manager on the Windows Mobile Team. Geekzone covered the event in good detail, but one of their points caused a lot of uproar in the blogosphere: 'If an application is approved but later removed from the marketplace it will then be automatically removed from all mobile devices.' That sounded a bit ominous to Ars Technica, so they checked in with Microsoft. 'In the vast majority of instances where an application is removed from Windows Marketplace for Mobile, users of this application will continue to be able to use these applications on their phones,' a Microsoft spokesperson told Ars. 'In the rare event an application from Marketplace exhibits harmful behavior or has unforeseen effects, Marketplace has the capability to remotely uninstall these applications. While we hope to avoid this scenario, we will make refunds available in such cases.'"

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Why not ask the owner 1st? by Anonymous Coward · 2009-09-19 18:20 · Score: 5, Insightful

I see the reasons for doing this, but I'm not sure I agree with the implementation. To me, a better way to handle this would be to not remove the application but to disable it instead and the next time the user tries to start it, give a short explanation on why it was disabled and maybe a link for more technical details with an option to enable/delete/stop. Sure, most users would probably immediately delete it, but it would be the users CHOICE too.