Yesterday night I was pretty excited to see that Spin the Bottle was downloaded 10001 time since the launch of Marketplace in October 2009.
It all started with a joke on Teched EMEA 2008 in Barcelona. By the end of the evening, Rizo got so enthusiastic about it that he stayed awake and delivered the first release already in the morning. Consequently we were able to show Spin the Bottle to the World in the very last panel discussion at the event.
When Marketplace got in place last October we decided to put it on to gain experience with the application store and certification process, so we would have experience for consulting our customers.
We know the graphics of our app could be nicer – yet we never imagined it would be so successful. The development was done more or less in spare time, on the positive side the “lean” graphics make it work also on OMAP 200 based devices like the HTC Wizard.
Windows Marketplace was a little rough around the edges when it came out! Nevertheless I have to admit it got quite mature rather fast.
During the certification process the feedback from the marketplace authority about issues in our software when failing the test where precise and always to the point. This is a clear indication that enough manpower is involved in the testing and as a result the quality of the customer experience is kept high. As a consumer I like the way the application store works – nevertheless the IPhone’s software distribution has a still a little edge because it informs proactively about software updates. Because it can leverage a Push mechanism.
From my inside-the-industry position the only thing that’s strange is that companies who don’t have their HQ in one of the Windows Mobile Marketplace markets are banned from publishing software!
Re proactive information about software updates: the Marketplace client on the Windows phone does exactly this when you launch it in case there are updates available for apps that you bought. It just can’t show you a little red circle with the # of available updates attached to the Marketplace icon in the Start menu because we have no push mechanism for that today.
Thanx for the feedback I edited the post and made it a little more precise 😉
“Because it can leverage a Push mechanism.”
Talking about problems of marketplace:
you did notice that the rating (“Bewertung”) you got in your screenshot does not reflect the real one in the marketplace?
In the dev site it will always show 5 stars, nonregarding your real rating on marketplace.
True this is a known Issue according to MSDN Forum – what i hate even more is that I can’t view comments of users from markets other than mine.