An interesting aspect of this is "How can you tell if a streaming site/app is legitimate?"<p>There are so many weird, on demand, maybe you need a cable package, maybe it's just all you can eat, maybe it's just a 2 month free promo, services out there that it's really hard for the average person to know what is legitimate.<p>The shrinking release windows and ongoing push for day and date digital releases just makes it even harder.<p>Case in point: TubiTV just randomly showed up on my Roku recently - It's available on XBox and streams a bunch of different stuff. Should/do I need to verify that they've correctly licensed their movies before watching?
Microsoft's success is closely related to piracy. Piracy helped Windows to become the majority. This is no different and IMO Microsoft intentionally don't fight against those apps very strongly to help their store to succeed.
Every app store is full of crap. App stores are a centralized service, so there is no way to avoid crap ending up in them because there's nowhere else for the crap to go!<p>Besides there are actually very few apps that are regularly useful to me on my limited-OS (non-desktop) devices and those are: Camera/Photos, SMS/Messaging, Web Browser, Phone Dialer, Contacts, Google Maps, Calculator, Email, KeePass and Clock/Calendar.<p>Beyond that, every other app under the sun could disappear and I wouldn't miss them.
This is a problem with any app store to some extent, even Apple's.<p>The difference here is that Microsoft seems to be encouraging low quality apps to boost its "app count" numbers to make its store seem more attractive. Also, many legitimate services do not have an app for Windows so users get tricked into installing fake apps or end up resorting to privacy.
dunno about app store, but in my country responsibility lies on uploader, not on me as user streaming video or music content for my private non-commercial use, it makes sense since it's not in my ability to verify every service
Noticed this yesterday when looking at the store on my xbox one. Tons of variations of "free movies" almost like Microsoft doesn't even bother to spot check whats submitted.