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Trouble For Microsoft Developers With the Windows Store
An anonymous reader writes "This blog post from an un-happy Microsoft developer highlights many of the problems that developers are having with submitting to the new Windows store. His app, that won 2 App X challenges from Microsoft, has been rejected 6 times over 2 months with no clear indications as to the cause. This is even after going through a rigorous early-certification process. With Windows RT relying solely on apps from the store, and there being just over 7,000 apps total, Microsoft could have a big problem here."
that's only like 3 per RT user?
the horror
Uhm. The OS is released and there's major dumb-fuckery going on in their online store, the ONLY place you can buy apps from for certain versions of the new OS.
That's not a "could have a big problem" thing.
That's a "HAS a big problem" thing.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
First they reject apps on their own store, now they're rejecting apps on Microsoft's store! When will the insanity end?
I tried to submit and app called the Windows Store but it was rejected because it duplicated the existing functionality of the Apple App Store.
Developers! Developers! Developers!
Developers?
[sound of crickets]
Have gnu, will travel.
...honestly, but between Apple's psychotic terms and Google's loose terms leading to virus problems, I really just don't care. Someone will come up with a third-party installer that won't require any kind of permission or certification from Redmond, and since the bulk of people who'll have a snowball's chance in hell of actually noticing this deficiency will use that third-party loader, it won't really matter. If anything it'll allow for a separation between the mundane, boring user and the geek, techie, nerd, what have you.
Is post-geek a label? As in, one who used to pay attention to the excessive details of digging deep into how something works, but now has graduated into the realization that one can do whatever one needs to do with just about any tools or platform or system and no longer has a need to scrutinize so strongly because one's skills are good enough to weather any circumstances regardless of the technological changes?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Where everything is free and wonderful all the time.
I never thought of it before: All of the developers for windows are trying to get their apps submitted into the store right now. Do you know what percentage of windows developers were good enough to even figure out Visual basic? Like maybe 25%? Now they have to review all fo those apps? Sweet sweet karma! Can Zend and Oracle open up a app stores too?? Thank you God, I always knew you existed!
Is anyone else annoyed by the fact that the latest logo has Pac-Man eating ghosts that aren't running away?
Mod me down if you must, but surely the logo is more interesting than the tenth Windows 8 story in the past 24 hours.
Sounds pretty much like the experience you get on the Mac App Store as well. Can't Microsoft do anything without copying?
(Seriously, the MAS staff are some of the most arrogant assholes I've had to deal with from that company, and that's saying something!)
Most computer users don't want a Wild West computer experience. They want a safe, functional one where the computer interface is as inobtrusive as possible. They want as little burden on their consciousness as possible, so they can focus on what they want to use the computer to do in the first place.
When you have an audience like that, expect tradeoffs. Less flexibility, more stability. Fewer options, more consistency. And now, the days of downloading random bits of code are over.
For 90% of the users out there, this will be a great experience. The rest will dual-boot...
Futurist Traditionalism
"Swipe or scroll through a continuous collage of all your photos, dynamically generated as you browse. The layout is different every time, bringing your attention to new photos each time you browse a folder."
Nobody is going to miss that.
And ye shallovercome !!
Don't give the man a chance to keep you down !!
Amen !!
he should run the Windows App Certification Kit tests
Try reading the article. He talks about how his results from running WACK on his own machine differed from the results obtained from the review process, and the frustration that occurred because Microsoft does not provide verbose reporting back on what actually went wrong.
No, pretty sure *you* are the idiot here. If you'd actually RTFA, instead of whatever brief skim you took, you'd have seen that the guy ran WACK every time... and that it always ran clean on his system. He eventually got a failure out of it by running his VM's performance down to the Win8 mimum specs, but even after fixing that he continued getting unexplained errors from the certification process that didn't show up on his local system.
Also, WACK failed to catch a very simple and obvious thing - a piece of dev/test code that he'd left in a constructor, which will crash the app when run if installed from the store - that it clearly should have. That's exactly the kind of thing that static analysis should have found.
I'm rather shocked by Microsoft's failures, here. Usually, they're very good with dev tools and communication. Not this time, it seems. You'd think they'd have learned from the problems Apple had... it almost feels like they're trying to repeat Apple's mistakes too.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
"every person that I talked to personally was always helpful"
What are you talking about? You just got done saying that everyone you contacted either didn't get back to you, or didn't give you any explanation about why your app keeps failing with no useful error message. You call that helpful?
Steve Ballmer to Developers: Drop Dead
Have you read the post? He ran the tests.
- Performance: Make sure that your app suspends correctly.
If an application that uses code provided by Microsoft to save a single string doesn't "suspend correctly", then what application does "suspend correctly"?
Ooh! I certainly hope so... ;o)
This is why walled gardens suck. You make the software, you should be able to sell the software without needing some greedy suit's stamp of approval.
Don't play their game.
MS's effort to emulate the iWalledGarden has been a partial success. They have a more impervious wall than Apple does. Too bad MS can't grow anything useful inside their wall.
There's a side story here, right?
Perhaps the main reason that Steve "me-too!" Ballmer is copying Apple is because he has seen them do something that has proven to be very profitable and decided that it would be a good way to try and turn-around Microsoft's ailing fortunes.
But the other aspect of this - which will certainly appeal to Ballmer - is the control that the "App Store paradigm" gives the owner of the platform. In Apple's case it's set up with a bit of an "Absolute Dictatorship" over what they will and will not allow in their store, but it is accompanied by a certain amount of rigour to weed out rogue software. In Google's case there is more of a laissez-faire attitude, but then users of the Android Marketplace have less reassurance about the quality and honesty of Apps they choose to download.
In Microsoft's case, it's too early to tell for sure. What we do know, however, is their track record when it comes to open competition in a marketplace. Put simply: they hate the idea. Microsoft are a convicted Monopolist with a track record of questionable and potentially anti-competitive activities a mile long. Companies they can't beat in open and fair competition, they buy. In fact, many of their most successful technologies started out as purchased applications (components of Office, such as Visio; Internet Explorer; etc, etc)
It will be interesting to see how regulators view the terms and conditions of the App Store, and how it plays out in practice. I was particularly interested to see the commentary from id Software, the folk behind the Steam store. That's been a well established and dominant "App Store" solution on the Windows platform for some time now, but I am not sure if id are going to commit to the Windows platform long term... If they do it would be interesting to see what would happen to the Microsoft portal if Steam started to offer business applications - because Microsoft will surely offer games in an attempt to grab a big chunk of the Steam marketplace.
One other observation... Whilst I am sure that it's working, I wonder if Apple's MacOS/X App Store is quite as successful as their iOS App Store? The latter is perfect for mobile apps and the "$1.99 brigade" of software toys that cost you less and entertain you more than a typical hobby magazine from a conventional book store. I don't see desktop users buying in to the same sort of segment in quite the same way. Sure, there will be bargain-basement apps at near-give-away prices, but I wonder if it's as popular with users? Developers may love it because it reduces distribution costs to zero. It may help reduce piracy in some instances. But these are critical for a different reason: they are features that matter more to the platform owner (Microsoft) than the customer (the end users). I wonder when we'll get to the point where that pendulum has swung too far?
yes i reread it and he ran the test and failed miserably until two months ago, after submission it failed when he ran it in a slow machine something he never did before. and is stated as a requirement to pass the tests.
How do you go through an ordeal like that and then spend your time writing that much about it? You can never get the time back you spent rambling about some bug fixes.
Well how about the tests being stupid? Windows is not a realtime operating system. Saying that on all machines under all loads it has to do something in a constant amount of time is not sane. Sometimes what is normally a very quick operation will take two full seconds. The dopes on the WinRT team do not know this and have instead made the impossible into a certification requirement. (Yes, I know a bunch of them them, and yes, they are dopes. For full disclosure I used to be an MSFT employee.)
Next you'll tell me that their certification process requires solving the halting problem and yes, that's a good thing, the guy is lame for not covering all potential non-halting code paths.
I'm gonna go with a guess that this has to do with the logo of Memorylage, which appears to have as a component, the Aperture Science logo rotated left a few degrees...
Once again microsoft is trying to copy apple. They too want an app store that rejects everything for stupid reasons!
Apple should sue. i'm sure they have a patent on a badly run app store submission system.
I'm still gonna write off the constructor issue to the dev not keeping a clean system around to deploy onto.
It's not exactly hugely encouraged for arbitrary apps - it's supposedly for dev/test and for organization-specific internal apps - but any Windows 8 or Windows RT device can sideload "Metro"-style apps just fine. They don't make it easy; you have to use the command line (Powershell, specifically) for both the "developer unlock" and for installing the apps (at least, that's the easiest way that I've found), but it doesn't cost anything.
I don't have any idea how this guy would respond to a suggestion that he post the .APPX somewhere we can download it for sideloading, but in theory, this could have been done.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
No loops, no recursion, just a return statement. If you're a coder and truly have no clue whether your program halts or not, you have no business writing programs in the first place.
Oh, but he did it, and he also did send the program to a lot of MS employees and affiliates to test, and it passed every time.
Which he would have easily fixed if the certification process had given him the conditions of the failure in the results.
The Surface was dead before it ever launched. The reason is that there is no tablet market, there's an iPad market.
Most people have no use for tablets. There are niche uses (the in medicine) but by and large there just isn't a real use for tablets. People are not going to be able to get rid of their computers because tablets are lousy for content creation, even basic content like writing an e-mail or forum post. However they aren't portable like a smartphone so you don't take it with you all the time. They try to fill a niche where your smartphone isn't large enough for what you need, but your laptop isn't portable enough. There is almost none of that in a normal person's life. I've yet to meet someone that has dumped their smartphone or computer for their tablet and as such they really don't need it.
However, the iPad is a cool tech toy, and fashion accessory, to have. People want one because it is cool, not because they need it. They want to be seen with it and they want to mess around with it. However that is only the case because it is an iPad. Apple makes the cool consumer electronics currently. MS never will, they are horrible at selling style.
So they are trying to get in to a market that just isn't there. Tablets are going to fade away as the fad passes. People will find that their smartphone is just more convenient for the "small" computing needs and that a laptop or maybe desktop are better when you need to do some work or the like.
Even if they had a stellar app store with tons of apps the surface still wouldn't go anywhere because nobody gives a shit because it isn't an iPad.
1) every appstore starts small
2) the number of apps does not correlate to their usefulness
3) every appstore has it's issues with randomly rejecting apps (at least I remember similar news about apple's store)
4) the damn thing is new, so some kinks (eg. unclear reasons for rejection) are to be expected
I'm no microsoft lover, but anything spewing on old Microsoft these days reeks badly off "Apple Press". Specially *THESE* days, around the surface release.
The saddest part is, you can't even claim they get paid for their shilling. A whole big lot of them do it for free. Not all. Go read the Gizmondo Surface review. Holy fuck that's a paid review if I ever saw one. Madden and CoD IGN reviews are more honest, and that's really saying something.
Thanks for putting a word to that. I call it having a job, wife, and kids, and just wanting shit that works. That and having seen enough of the tech treadmill that you see the patterns. The good ones are all the same, in a way, and the bad ones all lose.
How apt: belief based development.
Back in the mid 90s, I worked at a games company where we were struggling to get the performance of Direct3D Retained Mode (anyone else remember that?) up to anywhere near Glide levels on Voodoo hardware. It was "escalated" until some DirectX "evangelist" rocked up at our office to "assist."
His "assistance" consisted of looking out of the window and telling us that we must be doing something wrong, because his developers assured him that D3DRM should perform better than anything that we could roll ourselves.
"Look," we said, "here's the same app, showing the same scene, and the framerate of the D3DRM version is half that of Glide."
But he wouldn't look. He literally wouldn't look at the screens. He wouldn't even acknowledge the problem. Just kept going on about how we must be mis-using it, because he had been assured.
Needless to say, we dropped D3DRM, as did everyone else, and it died in a corner, alone and unloved. But it did give us a valuable insight into the developer and "evangelist" culture at Microsoft. I think all Windows developers learn it eventually, which is why Microsoft need a constant influx of bright eyed, bushy tailed young suckers who'll fall for the line that they only hurt us because they love us so much.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Its not just the app store that is the problem. I was about to purchase a MSDN subscription, and took a peek at the current situation with respect to license keys and installation of developer operating systems, and couldn't believe how much effort MS must have expended in creating such a confusing and unmanageable mess. They wont get my money. It is much more expedient to NOT develop for Windows. I will continue developing for various mobile platforms, and Linux, and even IOS, but MS has made everything far too difficult.
It would seem that MS has never really properly weighed up the economics of draconian license keys vs the benefits of implicitly TRUSTING THEIR DEVELOPERS. MS used to trust me as a developer - and I behaved 100% in accordance with that trust - but now they DON'T TRUST ME and as a result I NOW HATE THEM. That is the outcome they have generated. I will never purchase an MSDN subscription ever again.
I'm not familiar with the platform but leaving dev/test code in a constructor seems a fairly basic mistake. Just repeating the mantra 'the tests didn't catch it' is indicative of a drone mentality. The objective is not to pass the tests. The objective is to develop a bug-free app, which a test suit helps you achieve.
Why the hell aren't Microsoft sending stack traces of crashes back to developers? Are they so incompetent that they've forgotten how software is developed?
1) WinRT apps are blocked via MS Store: i.e., you need MS' permission to distro... or do you? 2) WinRT apps can be created via Visual Studio 2012 Express... 3) WinRT apps created locally can be run locally without using the MS Store. Solution) Create Open Source distribution channel powered by Visual Studio 2012 Express to deliver WinRT apps to anyone. Since apps are compiled locally, they dont need to be on the MS store to run Catch) must be open source, funding will have to be donation-based or similar, no assurances of quality, security, or safety.
I love to slaughter the english language.
Actually, the softies are pretty OK people. Unlike us, users, they see the screw-ups developing literally in slow motion, resulting in sub par end products and services delivered. (What requires rather high pain tolerance threshold on their part. Few manage to survive there.)
It's the career management and sales who are total [censored], killing all the good from the inside.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Seriously, though, without him standing up against one of those arrest record height charts, you'd not know he was well over 6 ft.
The objective of a static analyser is to catch this sort of basic mistake.
Just saying "the coder should have removed it anyway" seems to be blaming the customer not the product sold to them.
This seems like a reoccuring theme....
Another account of the issues with the Windows Phone app store is also mentioned by a Developer working for Ceton (though the posts are from his personal blog...)
Blog post detailing the problem: http://www.motzwrit.es/post/33309406053/a-broken-process
Initial thread discussing delays in the process: http://www.thegreenbutton.tv/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=3093
--
Time is on my side
That usage you have there IS a niche. Not as in "Very few people would use it" but as in "A small part of the use case of that class of device (computer)".
I've seen this more than once now and have no idea where it comes from:
"80% of Apple apps has never been downloaded, less then %1 earned more the $1000"
CITE OR GO AWAY
Must be because MS is diligently "re-writting" something very similar to the app trying to get published. Nah MS has never done that.
Bob? Microsoft Bob? You met Microsoft Bob in a science museum? I think we might be on to something here...
"His app [...] has been rejected 6 times over 2 months with no clear indications as to the cause". Microsoft always trying be Apple.
I read the article and it sounds like this guy is debugging and QCing by submission. He sounds like a sloppy programmer. Microsoft rejected his app and gave him the technical reasons why. He failed two more resubmissions. The first two comments on his blog sum it up nicely:
"We had the opposite experience. We ported a complex WP7 XNA game to Windows 8. We got invited to the App Excellence Lab. We won an early access token. We submitted to the store in July and passed on the first try. To date we've submitted to the store 3 times and passed all three times."
"Makes me wonder if his code is very inefficient"
Personally, I'm glad they are rejecting apps that don't work or perform as required.
Floating in the black seas of infinity without a paddle.
Why in the world would a developer spend all their time and resources for Windows 8? Most of the customer base is with Android's smart phones and tablets. If a Developer wants to maximize it's customer base globally, then it's going to be the Android platform.
They may be facing difficulty now, but I'm sure that we'll eventually see that this is just the beginning of their problems.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Posting as AC doesn't mean you hide that your facts have been proven false> .
The main problem you have is that it doesn't even match common sense. some 2/3 of apps are free, so you are claiming a huge number of apps have not been downloaded even when free... sure buddy.
As for a discovery system - it's called the web and advertising. Perhaps you should look into this "web" thing sometime.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ok, you've applied a heuristic to tell me that a no-op will halt, but the general problem remains unsolvable.
And yes, in a large code base and execution environment (where that includes libraries in your address space and also the kernel) it can be very non-obvious that something does not halt.
I hope Microsoft has 30 or 60 day trial version of windows 8 so I can try it out before purchasing it. I evaluated the enterprise evaluation version and i really did not see any improvement over the windows 7 unless the final version is a vast improvement over it. After promotions is over the OS pricing will jump to regular windows 7 pricing $200+ for a single license, this is what I hate about MS the most. Don't understand why they can't list it at least $60 for full pro single license, not the upgrade. I also ran the evaluation on a netbook with 2gb ram and it ran horribly slow, mint and ubuntu on the same machine pretty fast even with the sucky gma500 open source drivers.
MS 30% cut for every metro app sold is pretty damn ridiculous. But no one is forcing you to buy windows 8 or develop for the Metro Store, well unless MS keeps attacking linux trying to destroy it. But I do like how MS offers visual studio express for free.
I am the developer who wrote the article, and just wanted to update people that it is now in the store. While I am happy to finally see it released, I was a little annoyed that it just passed, as I didn't make any changes since the 6th failure. I was just told to re-submit so they could escalate internally (before the article went up, so it wasn't due to that), and I just assumed they would have someone looking closer at the failure to explain what it was. It's frustrating that after all of this, I still don't know what was causing the crashing. If the issue was on their end though, hopefully it will just be one of the many kinks they have to work out, and it won't affect anyone on-going. Here is the link to the app. http://apps.microsoft.com/webpdp/app/memorylage/269b17da-9475-4339-9786-2131c9880d52
I thought the developer fee was limited to a specific number of applications (five?), beyond which point each application carried an extra annual fee. Or maybe that was just the Windows Phone 7 store.
I know there is no limit on the iOS App store, $99 is a flat fee regardless of how many applications you publish.
I'm pretty sure the Windows Phone 7 store has no limit either, though I have no direct experience publishing there to be sure.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
MS has an intel based tab due for delivery in 2 month and apps for it can be side-loaded. Businesses will probably suck on these, unless winders 8 proves to be too much of a pain in the arse.
I don't know about you, but I certainly don't want to suck on *anything* that's a pain in the arse. That's just not hygienic.
No, not even if it's been removed, washed, and properly sanitized.
:-P
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."