From the WMPU article:
Did you know you(yes you) first downloaded Twitter and Candy Crush today on your Windows device? No? Check it. You also first downloaded them the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that, and you’ll download it tomorrow for the first time, and the day after that. And the day after that. Or at least, that’s what Microsoft’s Windows 10 store will tell you.
He's right, you know. Look in 'My library' on your Windows 10 laptop. They're both there. Every day. Gulp. Err..... Microsoft? Anyone?
As far as user facing features go – and this one that is very, very annoying for us – the app store no longer shows last updated dates. Imagine looking for an app and finding a paid app in the Windows store and then downloading it, only to discover it was last updated 4 years ago? That would be very annoying indeed. But the Windows store shenanigans don’t stop there, anyone familiar with the Windows 10 express settings screen knows that Microsoft automatically enables auto-updating of store apps. This would not be bad in itself if a) the store did not hide when apps were updated from you and b) changelogs were made useful.
As a writer for AAWP, the first thing I do on any phone, of course, is disable auto-updating, so that I get a heads-up when updates are available. But yes, it's horribly frustrating that Microsoft still hides the date details in Store entries - this was working pretty well under Windows Phone 8.1.
When Developers (at least non Microsoft ones), update their apps in the store, they often put a changelog to indicate what has changed. Whether it is bug fixes and improvements, or a massive feature list. In Windows Phone 8.1, not only could you view this changelog, but you could also quickly jump to apps what are updating to see the details. In Windows 10? Not yet. Not only is the process of getting to the changelog on mobile devices extremely painful, but the actual changelog does not show up in the store for at least 6-8 hours.
Also bizarre. Updates appear, i.e. the binaries download happily, but the textual description updates take up to a day to arrive. Err... that's a bit late!
Finally, the store search algorithms reveal that even though Microsoft updated its Windows guidelines and pledged to purge the app of store, it needs to adopt a scorched earth policy and ban developers and IP addresses wholesale.
Indeed. We're still seeing 'fakes' and 'clones' of popular titles popping up and being approved by (presumably) automatic algorithms rather than humans. Banning dev-names and IPs is a good start, but as we know from Disqus spam on this very site, even that's not enough. Not for the first time, I think manpower, i.e. human eyeballs, needs throwing at the problem.
Speaking of developers, another developer has posted on the issue of Microsoft’s store app literally burying his app. Here is an excerpt from his article:
”The problem: Since Windows 10 arrived, the sales of all of my apps, which have been very low compared to other apps stores, have gone down significantly, nearly to zero (even the one I upgraded to Windows 10). And it is not surprising that this is the case: You cannot find my apps anywhere in the app store. Unless you know the exact name of my app, you won’t find it. You can type any of the keywords my apps have in their title, description or even in the list of keywords submitted to the store, and it won’t list my apps.
"It’s not like this is a recent bug or similar: It is the way now since about half a year. I am not sure what Microsoft is thinking here. It seems like there is this big corporation, and the people in there have no clue what they are doing. With Windows 8, the process of creating software for their app store was really nice. The documentation is great, signing, testing, verifying and uploading was a piece of cake. And the website for managing all this (named ‘Dashboard’) and looking at your sales was impressive. With Windows 10 thing got worse. There is no way to update your Windows 8 (.1) C++ project to Windows 10. You have to manually edit your solution and project files with a text editor at a few dozen places to make them work. And they replaced that Dashboard with a new version, which is barely useable, shows only half of the information and only works if you have a very big screen and surfing with a browser made full size. Really strange.
Whatever the reason for all this is, I won’t develop any apps for Windows 10 anymore, since I cannot make any money with them. And I can recommend other developers to do the same: Don’t start developing apps for Windows 10, in the hope your apps will sell on the app store.”
All sad and disturbing. Whatever plaudits Rafe and I throw at Microsoft for the way Windows 10 and the Insiders Programme have been handled, we can only heap criticism on the Store team, for the umpteenth time. There are real problems here. If there was one area where Microsoft needed to shine, in these days of the 'app gap', it was an easy development workflow and a flawless Store. Both are currently very disappointing.