Developer: “There Is Absolutely No Adoption for the Windows Store”

Megalith

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Despite Windows 10 approaching 700 million active users, the Microsoft Store is barely gaining any traction. That’s according to multi-platform developer Webrox CEO Stéphane Graziano, who has not witnessed any real uptick in usage despite the OS’s user growth. He calls it a “disaster,” as Windows Phones users are now a minority, and PC users have no reason to use it.

Stéphane feels Windows is simply not an app platform anymore, noting “when you start your computer, you are going to the web and use File Explorer. Optionally if you are a worker or student you could use Office, but you would never go to Windows Store, why would you go there?”
 
Adaption of new technology like this probably requires an exclusive killer app.

I remember buying Half Life 2 on disc in 2004 and wondering what that garbage Steam program was for.

I agree to this. They should as well release the MS office suites in the app store for starters (as full UWP apps). I honestly want the Windows store to work.
 
Installers are still king. I've never had the need for their app store.
 
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There are only two games I played using Microsoft Store and that was because it was exclusively there. Gears of War and Sea of Thieves. Soon as I was done with them (Sea of Thieves is utter garbage right now) I uninstalled them and haven't touched Microsoft Store again... It's annoying to need to use Epic Launcher for Fortnite, Battlenet for Overwatch, League Client for League of Legends, or Origin for Battlefield/Battlefront when everything else is on Steam and mostly uses their interconnected services... but at least those apps are all usable. Microsoft Store just has a terrible UI that takes too many steps to do the most basic task while lacking features the others have had for years.
 
The only app I ever downloaded from the store on my PC and still use is a metronome.
 
I service and fix a lot of domestic and small business Windows machines.

I would say take up of Windows Store is near zero yeah. The email app is the only one I've seen used in the wild.

I also switch all that crap off if I build a machine for a customer. Not had a single complaint.

My biggest chore is having to tell people -

"You don't have to use your email account and email password to create a windows account!!!!"

Dumbest idea ever.
 
Adaption of new technology like this probably requires an exclusive killer app.

True but Win32 for so long has been an app rich ecosystem that "killer" apps are tough to come by these days. There are some useful app in the MS Store, especially if you have a 2 in 1 or tablet device. There are a number of streaming apps, Netflix, Hulu, CBS, etc. The failure of Windows phones clearly hurt the MS Store and a major reason why Microsoft developed Project Centennial to ease packaging of Win32 apps. I just treat it like another store and if there's something useful there I use it.
 
While I would completely hate this idea, I think that if they made it a necessity to use the store, more adoption would come. For example, you start your computer and the only application that exists would be the Windows Store (No notepad, internet explorer, file explorer, etc.) From there, you would use the store to extract packages from the image source (USB Drive, DVD, etc), via a package or recovery partition or via the internet, forcing anyone who wants to use their computer to use the store while also making the OS pretty lean (Make me happy as I wouldn't have any Microsoft trash on my PC.)

Once again, I wouldn't like it as a user however it seems if I need to gain more traction for my app store, and I already have a large market share, this would be the way I'd do it.
 
I have a few things I use from the store, can't remember what they are since not at the computer. I wouldn't mind seeing more reasons to use it.

Totally agree about a killer app like steam for the store, I was pissed when I had to install steam in mid2k for games. Only took like 6 months for me to not use it for like everything I could.
 
While I would completely hate this idea, I think that if they made it a necessity to use the store, more adoption would come. For example, you start your computer and the only application that exists would be the Windows Store (No notepad, internet explorer, file explorer, etc.) From there, you would use the store to extract packages from the image source (USB Drive, DVD, etc), via a package or recovery partition or via the internet, forcing anyone who wants to use their computer to use the store while also making the OS pretty lean (Make me happy as I wouldn't have any Microsoft trash on my PC.)

Once again, I wouldn't like it as a user however it seems if I need to gain more traction for my app store, and I already have a large market share, this would be the way I'd do it.
Requiring it would spark lawsuits, and possibly a mass migration away from MS on the desktop/laptop.
 
This is just another case of Microsoft showing up late to the game. Most of their hardware has failed to catch on, and the store has been a train wreck from day one.
 
haven't used it much but it seems to work fine, got the forzas, a couple other games, Netflix app, spotify and a couple others, no problems.
but if a person is going to buy an app it will probably be on their phone. so not really all that surprised, im the only person ive known to have windows phones.
 
Yup, grabbed Gears of War 4 and the Dolby Atmos Headphone app for use with my DAC/amp and headphone setups. It's just another store and works about as well as the rest.
 
While I would completely hate this idea, I think that if they made it a necessity to use the store, more adoption would come. For example, you start your computer and the only application that exists would be the Windows Store (No notepad, internet explorer, file explorer, etc.) From there, you would use the store to extract packages from the image source (USB Drive, DVD, etc), via a package or recovery partition or via the internet, forcing anyone who wants to use their computer to use the store while also making the OS pretty lean (Make me happy as I wouldn't have any Microsoft trash on my PC.)

Once again, I wouldn't like it as a user however it seems if I need to gain more traction for my app store, and I already have a large market share, this would be the way I'd do it.

I’d most certainly not use Windows anymore. Or revert to an older version for as long as it still worked.
 
There are good reasons to avoid buying things from Microsoft Store:

- Microsoft Store offers limited control over where a program installs
- Microsoft Store sells UWP programs, and UWP is anti-consumer
- UWP is slower than Win32 and uses more resources than Win32
- UWP is less customizable than Win32 and not as moddable as Win32
- UWP offers fewer avenues for trouble-shooting
- Microsoft have an awful track record for reliability, posterity, and consideration of the customer. See GFWL, the rescinding of free OneDrive storage space, the removal of Win 10 admin controls in certain W10 editions, etc.
- due to the previous 3 items, UWP programs will be less likely to be accessible many years down the line, which means that buying a UWP program is not a smart investment


By design, UWP is less than Win32, and so there's no reason to ever buy a UWP product. In fact, it is self-undermining to buy a UWP product.
 
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I bought my new Dell XPS 13 (9370) from the Microsoft store about two months ago. Their price for a 4K/8GB/256GB model was about $200 less than on the Dell site. I put the savings toward a 500GB 960 Evo SSD. :)
 
Adaption of new technology like this probably requires an exclusive killer app.

I remember buying Half Life 2 on disc in 2004 and wondering what that garbage Steam program was for.

I don't even think a killer app can help. Rather, this is a situation where being a large company can actually be a detriment to your survival. For things like Steam or the Apple Store or Play Store, you need to be the first to do something, which, Microsoft wasn't. Remember, for Apple and Google, their stores were the first on their platforms. Microsoft was late to the party, and is going to pay for years because of it.
 
Not sure where you're getting all this but this one just isn't true.

"This is the biggest load of bullshit I have seen all day. UWP performance is not on par or faster than Win32. In a lot of cases it is dramatically slower because of the extremely limited framework. Try making a high performance encoder such as x264 in UWP. You can't, because you can't use asm code in UWP (at least not without some potential dirty workaround that I am not aware of, which could eat up the performance gains anyway).

It's very hard to write a slow program in UWP because of all the restrictions and things that are out of your control behind the scenes, but those same restrictions and automation makes it impossible to have the full control necessary when doing very fine optimizations."

https://linustechtips.com/main/topi...know-out-now/?do=findComment&comment=11288784
 
I see it like this.

I have a desktop computer. Not a mobile device. Why would I use something for apps when I want programs?

I want to be able to install anything I buy on anything I own. Even if it's using wine to run it under Linux.

I don't care what MS wants or any other company. I use windows for games that I can't play on other OS's. And I use any OS that does whatever job the best for whatever task I am going to do.

Imo MS lost site of developers after win7 and focused to much on trying g to copy everyone else instead of coming up with tried and true stuff but just making it better in the end.
 
There are only two games I played using Microsoft Store and that was because it was exclusively there. Gears of War and Sea of Thieves. Soon as I was done with them (Sea of Thieves is utter garbage right now) I uninstalled them and haven't touched Microsoft Store again... It's annoying to need to use Epic Launcher for Fortnite, Battlenet for Overwatch, League Client for League of Legends, or Origin for Battlefield/Battlefront when everything else is on Steam and mostly uses their interconnected services... but at least those apps are all usable. Microsoft Store just has a terrible UI that takes too many steps to do the most basic task while lacking features the others have had for years.

This! The UI is garbage for most Microsoft items. My wife tried to use a Windows phone for nearly 6 months. We both hated it. Windows Tiles, Microsoft Store, they are either unintuitive, repetitive, or seem to get you stuck in a loop rather than sending you to your wanted destination/outcome.
 
"This is the biggest load of bullshit I have seen all day. UWP performance is not on par or faster than Win32. In a lot of cases it is dramatically slower because of the extremely limited framework. Try making a high performance encoder such as x264 in UWP. You can't, because you can't use asm code in UWP (at least not without some potential dirty workaround that I am not aware of, which could eat up the performance gains anyway).

It's very hard to write a slow program in UWP because of all the restrictions and things that are out of your control behind the scenes, but those same restrictions and automation makes it impossible to have the full control necessary when doing very fine optimizations."

https://linustechtips.com/main/topi...know-out-now/?do=findComment&comment=11288784

UWP is essentially a subset of Win32 and COM APIs which some additional APIs around the modern GUI, cloud services, etc. that runs in a sandbox and they be distributed by anyone, they don't have to just come from the Microsoft Store. A well written UWP should perform on par with traditional Win32 apps and can even have certain performance advantages with it comes to UI rendering. My favorite PDF reader/light editor for Windows these days is Xodo in the Store. It's very well regarded and is very fast, and it's page rendering is smoother than any Win32 PDF reader I've ever used.
 
A well written UWP should perform on par with traditional Win32 apps and can even have certain performance advantages with it comes to UI rendering.

If that were true then Microsoft would have been able to produce UWP native versions of Win32 mainstays like Office with full function and feature parity, if not improve upon the Win32 version. But they haven't been able to going on six years now, and in the case of Office finally gave up and resorted to cheating by UWP wrappering the Win32 version with centennial as a perception stopgap.

There's just no getting around the fact that it looks really bad to developers and users when Microsoft can't even manage to build UWP native versions of their own software.
 
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If that were true then Microsoft would have been able to produce UWP native versions of Win32 mainstays like Office with full function and feature parity, if not improve upon the Win32 version. But they haven't been able to going on six years now, and in the case of Office finally gave up and resorted to cheating by UWP wrappering the Win32 version with centennial as a perception stopgap.

There's just no getting around the fact that it looks really bad to developers and users when Microsoft can't even manage to build UWP native versions of their own software.

I did say subset. You can't create things like services or create and use COM extensions, which is a big part of why by design UWP versions of Office can't fully replace the Win32 versions. But I was addressing the point made about performance. In general as so much of UWPs are Win32 there shouldn't be much of a performance gap between a well written UWP and Win32 app.

The Store versions of Office actually do quite a lot but lacking things like macros and COM extensions are big deals but many people would be able to use them fine if they didn't rely on those features
 
I think there are a couple of limitations that UWP apps have which Win32 apps haven't. And some of them have performance implications.
UWP being unable to run in fullscreen (instead just borderless windowed) was one of them iirc.
 
I think there are a couple of limitations that UWP apps have which Win32 apps haven't. And some of them have performance implications.
UWP being unable to run in fullscreen (instead just borderless windowed) was one of them iirc.

Exclusive full screen is a legacy feature that did help boost performance back in the day but my understanding is that with modern hardware and current versions of Windows 10 WDDM 2.2 or higher that there is no performance gain generally from exclusive full screen anymore.

I do get the point some are making, UWP isn't the full blown Win32 API by design so yeah, there are limitations by design and I get the idea of why would a developer use something that's "gimped". And for certain kinds of applications like full Office or development tools like Eclipse or Visual Studio, UWP isn't the platform for that kind of stuff. But where UWP does have the support , games, content play back, lighter weight productivity apps, etc. these days there just shouldn't be any performance degradation relative to an equivalent Win32. And the UWP app might have a faster and more responsive UI, UWP do seem to have smoother scrolling and zooming than Win32 apps. But that was kind of one of the points of metro/modern/UWP apps, more responsive UIs for things like touch input.
 
I don't use it much, but i have a few apps, like the Twitter client and Instagram. I also have the FB client, but I never use it, since my browser is already open 99.9999999999999999999999999999% of the time. Oh i have the mail app too, which I like. I tried Kodi as well, but for some reason went back to the installer version...don't recall why (or even if I had a reason).

I think the only way they're going to get adoption is to offer programs at a deep discount for some period of time to get people accustomed to using the store. I keep the icon on my taskbar, but it's pretty rare that I use it.
 
I want to get Forza Horizon 3, Forza 7, and Gears of War 4. If there is a decent sale in the future that is. Also, they might start releasing Halo games for PC. All Windows store exclusives of course.
 
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