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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.
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.
... on the mystical Debian island where all the computers are free and none of them work quite right...
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
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.
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...
Steve Ballmer to Developers: Drop Dead
- 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"?
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
Yeah, they could copy Apple's graphical desktop UI, and rename their product from 'DOS' to 'Windows'..
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
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.
You have a point there, but let's see our options:
1 - software that is free (as in I can improve it if I need to), even if buggy, and usually made with passion;
2 - software that restricts our actions as much as it can get with, usually just for the sake of money.
I've been choosing 1 almost exclusively for more than a decade and I feel happy about it, despite the occasional frustration with bugs.
The second option is a reflection of our greed-oriented society, with all its DMCA, SOPA, PIPA, DRM, WGA, TPM, EUFI-restricted bootloaders, EULAs and ToSs, etc. Was any of these designed to improve your quality of life? No, they were designed to identify any possible advantage they could take from you, and fuck you in the ass big time. It's your decision to keep feeding them.
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
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.
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
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.
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 hate to break it to you, but most people spend most of their time on computers doing very simple stuff: web browsing, Facebook, email, chat, simple games. Since all of this can be done on a tablet, and often more conveniently, people are buying tablets. For the occasional instance where they have to write up a real document in Word, they still have the 7-year-old Core 2 Duo laptop in the corner. They just don't see any need to replace it any time soon (even if it is still running XP).
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.
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
A majority of new PC's will have windows 8. Wouldn't you want to get your app in the app store asap, if you were already a windows app developer?
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
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
Cause its an untapped market. If you want to compete with apps on Android and iTunes, then you are competing with hundreds of thousands of junkware. At least on Windows you are competing with only thousands of junkware.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
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."
I'm just going to add to your example of what people can do with a tablet, using the iPad as my example because I don't know much about the Surface.
Now, let's say I don't have a computer or an Internet connection.
I can go to a store, buy an iPad with Wi-Fi and Mobile, and then go online and diddle with Facebook, et-cetera. I can setup an iCloud account, which is needed for the Store anyway, use it for email, and so on.
If I want to have the Internet on at home I can order an Internet connection hooked up to my house, wait for the modem to arrive, and then set it up wirelessly - plug modem in, wirelessly connect via DHCP and visit 192.168.1.1 in my Browser, set parameters, surf Internet wirelessly.
If I need to print stuff then I just have to make sure I buy a printer with AirPrint OR I could use an app like PrintCentral to print to any wireless printer, or any printer connected via Ethernet or USB to an Airport Express (unfortunately an Airport Express doesn't facilitate printing to a non-AirPrint printer on its own).
Let's say I want to do a lot of typing? I am currently writing this comment using my Logitech-branded Zagg keyboard (aluminium base and nicely responsive "large" Bluetooth keyboard that attaches snugly without clips to the iPad and protects the screen). Unfortunately you can't attach a Bluetooth mouse though, and I do sometimes get "Stylus Hand" after playing Trainz for a few hours.
If I buy the adaptor kit (I believe the Surface has a USB port already) then I can connect my camera and directly transfer photos and videos to my iPad for storage, editing, and sharing.
If you have a tablet with a keyboard then it's pretty much like having a small laptop. There are times when it's lacking, such as I can do some web design but I don't think I can run a web server for testing (haven't looked too closely) or I can write a book with any one of a myriad of writing programs but I can't do some low level editing of ePub files, but still I can make music, take and edit photos, record and edit films, do 2D/3D modelling for fun or architecture, record and publish Podcasts (audio or video), write a newsletter, create a presentation for the office, organise my finances, and then of course there's all the social apps that help people communicate and find each other (Find My Friends is nifty).
Some people may never really use their tablet's full potential, but that's okay. Most people will never use their personal computer's full potential either, not even if they have Word installed (New Page Break, what's that? I'll just \n \n \n \n \n down to the next page, and make some other poor bugger deal with it when they edit this later.)
Also if you have a personal computer and are willing to experiment you can also attach an external HDD to your iPad after jailbreaking it.
Te Quiero, Puta!