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Microsoft and app stores have a pretty long and rough history.
Windows Phone died at least in part because of a lack of compelling apps, and many have
criticized the store on the Windows 10 PC front for the exact same reason.
I mean, I bet many casual users don't even know there is a store on Windows 10 PCs.
But is all this criticism still valid?
Is the store still terrible?
I'm Marton from TechAltar, and let's explore the Microsoft Store.
Last year the store received a new logo and was renamed from Windows store to Microsoft store.
This apparently is supposed to signify that Microsoft no longer
thinks of this as just an app store, but rather a store for much more.
You can now download or buy the following things in the Microsoft Store:
Apps of course, games, e-books, Movies and TV shows, extensions for Microsoft Edge, the
default Windows 10 web browser, themes that let you customize the look and feel of Windows,
Windows version upgrades, fonts, and even Microsoft hardware, like Surface devices.
Availability depending on your region of course.
So there are a lot of categories now, but is the store any good for them, and if it
is, why should or shouldn't you use it?
Let's start with apps.
The Microsoft store now actually has many top tier apps.
Of course Microsoft's own apps, like Skype, Mail and To-Do, as well as Office are now
in the store, Music is well covered with third party apps from Spotify, Amazon Prime Music,
Deezer and even iTunes, yes, Apple of all companies moved their most used Windows app
to the Windows store.
Many top tier productivity apps like Slack, Dropbox, Paint.net and the Affinity apps are
present and so are nearly all the big social apps as well.
Although Facebook's apps seem a little half-baked.
Still, this is a big increase in both the quantity and quality of apps and it's in part thanks
to Microsoft opening up the store to new types of apps.
So the store first launched with only so-called UWP, or Universal Windows Platform apps, which
are native apps written for Windows 10, which, other than Microsoft, only a handful of high-profile
app makers adopted.
But since then, Microsoft made special bridges that let both traditional desktop apps as
well as progressive web apps come to the store, which, unlike UWP, are both platforms with
healthy adoption rates.
Of course there are still things missing, and they fall into four main groups.
Stores within the store, like Steam are not allowed and neither are browsers that don't
use the Edge rendering engine.
As of now, that covers pretty much all browsers.
Firefox or Chrome could technically start using the Edge engine, like they use Safari
on iOS, but I find that unlikely to happen on Windows.
So these are missing due to Microsoft's own restrictions.
But there are also two major companies voluntarily missing from the store.
Google, as a competitor of Microsoft has long tried very hard to have all of Microsoft's
efforts to build an ecosystem fail, instead building up Chrome as their platform, while
Adobe, the leader in creative software has so far chosen to keep their creative cloud
apps, like Photoshop out of the store, as it chooses to have its own little store to
bundle its apps in instead.
Either way though, while the selection isn't perfect, it has improved quite a lot over time.
But if you are wondering why should you use the store at all, instead of just downloading
stuff from the web like you've always done,
then the answer is that the Store makes things a little cleaner.
Apps from the web usually have annoying updaters, that launch on startup, making your boot times
longer, they run in the background, slowing your PC down, and update your programs when
you open them.
That's annoying.
Store apps don't have this and just update automatically in the background.
Store apps also run in a sort of container, which means that it's much harder for them
to have malware that accesses the rest of your system, and they are easier to uninstall.
Just right click, uninstall and they are gone.
No silly wizard and no junk left behind.
Either way, if an app you want is actually in the store, and you aren't likely to switch to Mac or
Linux any time soon, in which case obviously your purchases would get lost,
then I totally recommend getting stuff from the store.
When it comes to games though, I'm a little more mixed.
Because here Microsoft goes up against established stores like Steam or GOG, and Microsoft's
offerings are a little weak in comparison, I feel.
On the good side you have first party Microsoft games, like Minecraft, Halo, and Sea of Thieves,
plus some benefits from Microsoft owning Xbox.
Xbox play anywhere titles let you buy a game on a PC and also play it on the Xbox, or the
other way around, and there is the Xbox game pass, where you can pay a monthly subscription
fee and get a bunch of games for "free".
I also find that using the Microsoft Store in Windows Mixed Reality is a little more
convenient from a strictly UX perspective than using Steam, so if you are heavily invested into
either Microsoft's games, consoles or VR solutions, then yeah, the store brings some value.
I also very much dislike when developers insist on me having to download a downloader just
so I can download a game, like Blizzard does for example, and I would prefer if they just
used a standard store instead.
But Steam and GOG are hard to compete with on a PC.
They actually have the games most of us want to play, more social features, usually also
better sales and while I find especially the Steam UI a little overly complicated, these
are definitely more mature platforms.
Movies and TV has a reasonable catalogue of stuff to both rent and buy and apparently
if you are in the US, they even have over 200 movies in 4K.
Sadly 4K content isn't available in most other regions, and Microsoft hasn't joined Disney's
Movies Anywhere initiative yet either.
The service works well. Other than the fact that it only runs on Windows 10 deices.
But I'm still a little worried that Microsoft will one day just decide to
cancel this category, like they recently did with Music, and in that case you would lose
your whole catalogue, so I would say for renting movies it is recommended,
I rent movies from it all the time,
but for buying stuff, maybe not yet.
I have a hard time imagining that tons of people read E-books on their Windows PCs in
their spare time, especially since the catalogue isn't as great as it is on, say, Amazon.
But e-books should be interesting for education, since many schools use Windows devices in
class, and Edge is actually a really nice reader by now, with inking and other advanced
capabilities.
Themes are cool if you are into personalization, there are actually a lot of really nice ones
with pretty wallpapers, plus most of them are free, so check them out.
The store also makes it really easy to upgrade from one Windows version to another, which
is cool, and Edge extensions, well, if you use Edge, you don't have an alternative, so
use the store.
Fonts are also available in the store now, although this seems like a really basic implementation
for now, with a very limited selection.
I would love to have the option to have custom fonts just sync between my Windows devices,
so I hope Microsoft builds this out further in the future though.
And finally, there is hardware.
You can now buy hardware from Microsoft and their partners for thousands of dollars through
the store.
Why would you do it here instead of going to, say, the Microsoft website?
I have no idea, but I guess also why not.
So the selection has improved significantly, but there are still a few issues left.
First of all, the amount of crap apps that just surfaces on the Microsoft store
Is a little higher than it is on, say, the Google Play store of the Apple App store.
There are also a few random bugs and glitches every now and then, especially around downloads,
and I have even noticed a few cases of fake reviews.
The China Daily app for example, which is the official English language paper of the
Chinese Communist party was released in the store and within a few days received over
600 reviews, all five stars here in Germany.
Or this new app called theChive, which is just a terrible news reader with lots of spam
in it, which has a ton of very good ratings in the German store.
Pretty suspicious especially when you compare that to Facebook (597), Spotify (234) and
other popular apps that have been in the store for way longer.
The fake China Daily reviews were removed it seems, but yeah, my point is that the store
still doesn't feel very polished.
So Microsoft clearly launched the store in a really rough state, where many people decided
that it as a terrible product that they just don't want to use.
Microsoft then did improve the store significantly, to the point where I actually recommend using it
for some things, like Music apps or productivity tools, but that came a little too late
Because getting rid of a bad reputation is a very, very difficult thing.
This is probably the most fundamental dilemma product managers at software companies have.
They want to launch products as early as possible to get user feedback to know exactly what to improve.
But they also want to launch as late as possible to avoid disappointing early users like the
Microsoft Store did.
This is a pretty complicated balance to find, and if you think you would be better at finding
it than Microsoft, then maybe you should become a product manager.
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