“Microsoft’s Windows Store is a mess. It’s full of apps that exist only to scam people and take their money,” Chris Hoffman writes for How-To Geek. “Why doesn’t Microsoft care that their flagship app store is such a cesspool?”
“It’s now been more than two years since Windows 8 was released, and this has been a problem the entire time, and it is getting worse. If Microsoft was trying to offer a safe app store to Windows users, they’ve failed,” Hoffman writes. “This problem isn’t a secret. Search the Windows Store for any popular app and you’ll see all kinds of junk… Within half an hour we managed to find fake paid versions of Adobe Flash Player, Firefox, Pandora, IMDB, Candy Crush Saga, Wechat, WhatsApp, uTorrent, Picasa, Bluestacks, Minecraft, Spotify, Google Hangouts, Picasa, Clash of Clans, Blender 3D, and a lot more.”
“Microsoft hasn’t been encouraging quality apps,” Hoffman writes. “Instead, they just want quantity.”
MacDailyNews Take: Because they’re desperate. Because they’re way too late. Because they’re badly beaten. To a pulp. And, because they were and continue to be a mismanaged, dysfunctional, rudderless industrywide joke.
“In March, 2013, Microsoft ran a promotion where they paid developers $100 for each app they submitted to the Windows Store or Windows Phone Store. They paid up to $2000 to each developer,” Hoffman writes. “So, if you’re a developer who spent months creating an amazing app, you only got $100. if you’re a developer who could pump out twenty terrible apps in a few weeks, you’d get $2000. Microsoft’s promotion encouraged developers to do the minimum amount of possible work and create a bunch of bad apps.”
Hoffman writes, “Microsoft’s attitude towards the Windows Store is quantity over quality. They just want a large number of apps without caring how good they actually are…. Here’s one of the most shocking parts of this. People from Microsoft are actually examining each of these scammy apps, checking their content, and approving them.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: It’s entirely appropriate that the Windows morass is fed by a cesspool.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “russ” and “Lee” for the heads up.]
Maybe the quality is a reflection on how well the review team was either trained, treated or both?
This could be the same quality control group that cleared and approved version after version of Windows. Same standards, then same blue screen virus infested hacker crap as the OS it runs on from the company know one respects.
I see Steve Balmer has a new sports team to screw up now.
A walled garden only works if the walls are functional. (It also helps to have something worthy within the walls.)
No matter how good a wall is, if you have Windows in it, crap gets in.
Hasn’t Windows always been a cesspool of scams?
“You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy…”
We must be cautious. 🙂
They’ve always valued facade over quality.
As did their users
Wholly unsurprising. Who still uses MS? Oh yeah, those forced to thru work or the utterly clueless who either can’t recognize quality or buy whatever shit PC deal is on “sale” at the big box retailers.
Microsoft has done Windows users a FAVOR, by putting the apps TO AVOID in one place.
Developers, developers, developer! 🙂
I guess their part-time unpaid intern is just too busy to check every app that comes in.
Seriously, MS should divide their app store into a small curated one, and a larger ‘anything goes’ parts, where results from the curated one would be dominant (especially for searches for official/legit apps, instead of myriads of clones with similar names and description) and inclusion in it be a powerful incentive for all app makers to fulfill any quality criterias to qualify for it.
That would be to assume that Microsoft could develop some critical taste, which….oh never mind.
Microsoft has been copying others since its inception. I’m kind of surprised that they’re getting worse at it, they should have it down to a science by now.
Microsoft’s Windows Store is a cesspool.