Comment by physicles

Yeah I remember hearing that announcement about incentives and thought it was obvious that crappy apps would come to dominate the store. Two things would’ve made the App Store better:

- First-party apps using the same SDK as third-party apps. This would’ve forced the third-party sdk to be awesome from the beginning, but it also would’ve delayed the launch of WP7 by at least 4-6 months. It wasn’t until a couple years later that some first-party apps switched to the public sdk and improvements were made, but by then it was too late.

- Google allowing us to build official apps for YouTube and maps. We even offered to build and maintain it, but they simply refused to allow those apps to exist on our platform.

I still had a wonderful time working on the product 2008-2012, but it’s really a shame WP never made it as a viable third platform.