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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.
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...
If writing a single string "in a machine with low memory, slow cpu" through the provided API takes more than two seconds, then nothing can pass the test.
Mind you, unlike on iOS, Microsoft permits app sideloading (even on ARM devices), with no extra costs or limits that I've seen yet.
Open Powershell as Admin
Enter the command: Show-WindowsDeveloperLicenseRegistration
Enter your Windows Live credentials
Download and sideload apps to your heart's content.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
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.
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.
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?
Must be because MS is diligently "re-writting" something very similar to the app trying to get published. Nah MS has never done that.