Why Publishing on the Windows Phone is Like Walking Barefoot On Broken Glass

What I find fascinating is the app store URL. It includes en-US and the app is identified by a GUID so you have no chance of working out what it is other than clicking on the link. Locales of fr-CA and fr-FR worked but not en-UK or en-GB.<p>Apple has a country code, the app name and a numeric id. But the app name is just decoration and is ignored, so you could easily mislead by putting in anything you want. From the country code it looks like they believe only one language is spoken in any country (eg I couldn't select between French and English for Canada). The ids aren't in numeric order - probably some sort of timestamp instead.<p>Google uses a descriptive URL without country or language parts, and then the app is identified by package name (bundle id equivalent for the iOS crowd) which looks fine to us techie folk and mostly follows being the DNS name with some extra gunk such as com.rovio.angrybirdsspace.ads<p>Amazon Android URLs are amazon.com/&#60;App Title&#62;/dp/&#60;ID&#62; where the app title is just decoration and can be changed to anything and ID is hexadecimal(ish).<p>They all have various issues. I think locale information as part of the URI path is silly. Titles in the URLs is nice but open up social engineering attacks. As a techie I like the Google approach of identification, but that too is prone to social engineering (to my knowledge they do not verify a correspondence to the publishing organization DNS). But it is prettier than random numbers. A GUID is Microsoft's hammer and solution to everything. In this case it just makes the URLs unnecessarily long.

"Offensive" context example: Imagine you're a woman in some mostly-islamic-and-not-so-women-rights-friendly country, you use this app on your phone and bang, your husband sees the loading screen joke about "other toys" (and of course he has an iphone and doesn't know about this app and the joke) ...only he can't remember seeing those toys himself so... who did you buy them for then? ...nex: let your ultra-violent imagination run wild

Horrible article. As someone who has created and published a Windows Phone app before, let me say that it is a pretty smooth experience. Developing with C#/Silverlight is a breeze, and MS has a good developer portal set up. The majority of the problems described in the article sound like the fault of the developer, not Microsoft. If an app ever gets rejected during the submission process, they list out all the reasons why it was rejected, along with the parts of their guidelines which detail out the rules.<p>Also, "the page is confusing and the statistics poor"? I don't understand how you could get confused by anything in the developer page. And how are download numbers from any desired time range considered poor statistics?<p>It's frustrating that an article like this could get so much attention on HN. If you want to have a nightmare of a time developing apps, try developing for BlackBerry. Or deal with Apple's multi-week process of app submissions.

I'm not sure why they don't just pull the app. They admit that it's bringing them virtually no users and it's a frustrating experience. With only a 1.3% market share (1), what reasons can there be to bother with it?<p>(1) <a href="http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/?p=32494" rel="nofollow">http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/?p=32494</a>

It know it's one of those irrational "the things you can't say on TV are the things you can't say on TV" kind of situations, but sexual innuendo and financial software don't mesh.

Windows might not be worth it for most developers. But it can be very worth while for a few.<p>Some months ago we had someone post how well their app was doing on Windows Marketplace vs Android's and Apple's simply because there's so little competition. In Apple and Andriod's marketplaces their app was just one out of thousands but it was so much easier to find and advertise on Windows' Marketplace that the Windows phone sold the most units of all 3. Their windows phone app made the developer more money than the other 2 combined.<p>So it all depends on what you're developing and who your target market is. Despite the tiny market share and other problems, Windows Phone users aren't app-phobic. They want apps too.<p>I am envious of your patience and persistence. However, I'm confused about your refusal to censor yourself.<p>Rather than get rid of unnecessary syncing messages referring to sex toys you instead refused to publish the app in China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iraq, United Arab Emirates? All because you didn't want to censor yourself? Who are you trying to impress? You're a business, not a freedom fighter. You're preventing people in other countries from enjoying your app. Why punish the people of a country based on the controlling manipulative laws their politicians put in place. Everyone's country is imperfect.

So I posted an app in the market place that got rejected the first time because I didn't include a privacy policy. I forget how much detail was included in the feedback when they told me this but it didn't take long for me to fix it and resubmit it. While I will agree it'd be nice if they sped the process up, its not slower than the competitions and it seems be about on par. Being on par isn't great though, and they should seek to excel and be better than apples process. Not sure how much that would help but its definitely a place to start. Anyways I'll be releasing another major update for my app soon so we'll see how it goes.

Does anybody have a positive experience with publishing to the Windows app store that they'd like to share?

So much for Balmer's "developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers...."

They say it's the same problem they would have with the apple/andorid store.<p>Big corp doesn't have nice ways of changing shit, this isn't specific to M$.

To me it looks like when they published their app from the US, they got all valid reasons for a rejection. The fact that Toshl's app was present for an year with all these faults is not a good argument for being automatically accepted.

Not impressed by this rant. The author admits some of the problems also happened on the App Store, and complains MS won't help them promote the app at this time. The reasons for which the udpated app was rejected at first seem valid to me (though specific info should have been given for the inappropriate content...).<p>Is it really expected that a developer should be able to move an app between accounts? Were they not aware of the limited audience of WP users? This should not come as a surprise after the second version of their app is done.<p>I will however agree the publishing portal is poorly implemented.

Walking barefoot on broken glass actually isn't that hard.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQIVPonHhx8#t=7m59s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQIVPonHhx8#t=7m59s</a>

Could it be that the trouble with developing for a mobile OS lumped in the 'other' category is that it is not a major ecosystem?<p>iPhone and Android app stores are well-worn paths for hundreds of thousands of developers world wide - right or wrong?

Its not true when they write: World outside the few largest markets does not exist<p>I am from denmark (hardly a large market) and had no problems creating a dev account and publishing apps but they are correct that not supporting as many countries as apple or google is wierd, but in the beginning android did not want to sell apps to danes either.

To be honest the app itself looks rather awesome.<p>Not sure what's the best way to generate users on WP but I do hope you get enough users and continue to support the platform.<p>Probably one of the most aesthetic apps on WP7, I for one will be using this from now on.

VP of Windows Phone at Microsoft just responded to the article in the comments. Looks like the blogpost made quite a splash.

What's "Windows Phone" and why should anyone care?

Have they decided to drop Windows Phone yet?

Link title should add "in Slovenia". It's more accurate, and it will save HNers time by giving a clue as to probable major contributor to the issues experienced.