Comment by jbigelow76
8 years ago
>For more niche apps they ran promotions for students and independent developers giving away free phones etc. But nothing was enough to get over the problem of the lack of an initial user base.
The one thing MS didn't try to incentivize independent app developers was to eliminate the 30% revenue cut MS would take on the sale of paid apps. I always thought it would have been a good differentiation as there were always complaints that it was getting too hard to for indies to make it in the iOS app store. Even if MS would have said they were waiving the commission during an introductory period of a few years it might have helped. It seemed penny wise, pound foolish to think they could charge the same skim that Apple does.
I recall they announced promotions like that as well. At one point I recall they would auto-cut at least in half for some amount of time if your app was chosen for the front page of the Store.
Since the Anniversary Update last year, sideloading has been enabled by default, too, if you wanted to sell apps outside the store, and that didn't magically attract indies either.
Sideloading is a thing on Android too, but it really doesn't attract a lot of devs or users. Most users stick to the stores, cause they don't want to go chase down and give their payment info to infinity different sites.
Not sure it would have helped. Any rational high-profile dev will compute that 70 % * 100 000 downloads is better that 100 % of 1000 downloads.
Sure, but it's not like they have to choose one or another. And 100% of 1000 downloads is better than 70% of 1000 downloads.
This reminds me of an interview question I "failed" once.
If you can't live with either of them, it doesn't matter. It's pointless to rank them. There are much better problems to put energy into. Like where to go for lunch.
There are only so many hours in the day. And, given the choice between fixing bugs and adding features for the many users on Android & iOS, or taking a gamble on a much lower userbase on WP, I'd probably take the first one.