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NITYA MALLIKARJUN: Hi and welcome to
the breakout session for the Microsoft Store on Windows.
In this session, we'll show you all the great things coming to
the Microsoft Store to help you be more successful on Windows.
We'll talk about new APIs to help you manage
your app submission directly from your build pipelines,
analytics to help you understand
how your app is performing on the store,
and new tools to help you attract
and engage with more customers on Windows.
I know you're going to love what we have to show you today.
But first, let me share the journey we've been
on over the last year and just how far we've come.
We built a new Microsoft Store around developer
needs and a beautiful user experience at its very core.
Windows is an open platform
designed to empower you to build great experiences.
It's been vital for us to help you get your code to
customers as quickly and as easily as possible.
We are committed to choice,
fairness, and innovation.
The new store welcomes all developers,
regardless of your choice of
framework, packaging technology, or commerce platform.
You could be a Windows developer,
a progressive web apps developer,
a React Native, Flutter, or Electron developer,
or even an Android developer distributing
your apps on the Amazon App Store,
you're all welcome on Windows.
Understanding the need for flexibility and fairness,
last year we announced new policies that allow app
developers to keep 100 percent of the revenue they make to
the store when they use their own commerce platform.
Developers that use the Microsoft commerce platform
get competitive rev share terms as well,
85 percent for apps and 88 percent
for games when distributing through the Microsoft Store.
The new store welcomed Win32 apps for the very first time and
introduced engaging new customer experiences
like stories and collections.
But the store is more than just a place for app discovery,
it's a distribution platform to help you get more customers.
We wanted to extend the same benefits you get on
the store to the web so your customers
can install your apps directly from
your website using the pop-up store experience.
Downloading an installer file,
finding the installer on disk,
and going through wizards are now a thing of the past.
As one of the most used apps on the PC,
the store gets your app in front of
an engaged audience on Windows,
always looking for new experiences.
When we introduced the new store on Windows 11,
we saw three times the number of visits over the previous store.
Customers are changing the way they find
and install apps and Windows,
and these moments of engagement create
new growth opportunities for developers.
Developers are excited about
these opportunities more and
more are bringing their apps to the store.
In the first three months of 2022,
we saw more than a 50 percent growth in new apps and
games compared to the same period
last year before we launched the new store.
Of course, we think
the Microsoft Store is the best place to launch your apps,
but you don't have to take it from us.
Developers bring us their apps for many different reasons,
some of which you saw in the keynote earlier.
Now, before we dive into exciting new features that are
coming, I want to take a moment to celebrate some of
the great developers and
partners who brought their apps to the store.
We asked our customers to choose
what are some of their favorite apps in the store
and we're excited to announce the winners of
the first Microsoft Store App awards.
Check out aka.ms/StoreAppAwards later this week
to find out who the winners are
and be sure to try out their apps.
The Microsoft Store is the best way to
target over a billion Windows devices,
and I can't wait to see you there.
Check out aka.ms/NewStore to learn more.
Now as we end our waitlist program for
Win32 apps and welcome all developers,
I'm going to hand it over to Pete to share some of
the great things that are coming for Win32 developers.
PETE BROWN: Thanks, Nitya. I want to talk
to you all today about some of the goodness we're bringing
for traditional desktop application developers
who publish their apps through the store.
We refer to these apps collectively as Win32 apps,
but really we're talking about
all the desktop application technology
that you use and love today.
Everything from C++ to .NET with
WPF and Windows Forms and MAUI to
Electron and Rust and Flutter and
Pascal and everything else that's
used to build desktop applications today.
These are the applications which quite frankly are
what make the Windows ecosystem and
the Windows platform so powerful.
But historically, these applications haven't had an easy
way to track analytics from everything from acquisition,
from the store all the way through to actual use.
I'm happy to say we're changing all that.
If you publish your Win32 application through the store,
we're able to provide some great insights,
not just in how the application performs in use,
but how the install process works as well.
I've logged into my partner center dashboard where I can
see my published Win32/desktopapplication.
I've noticed that I have a number of install failures.
The PC ecosystem is huge and diverse,
so this isn't all that unusual that
a desktop app installer may hit
an edge case on a particular device configuration.
But with the traditional desktop app,
you don't normally get any analytics at this stage,
it's all happening at the install step.
Our install logic works to handle the known MSI codes
gracefully, but there are other return codes from
MSI and EXE installers which are
meaningful and actionable really only to you as a developer.
You don't really need a lot of
infrastructure in place to capture this data.
But now when you distribute your Win32 apps via the store,
you get access to all that data for free.
You can slice and dice the data here,
you can see, for example,
if it's failing on certain hardware configurations,
Windows versions, or something else.
Again, super useful information and a really
good reason to publish your Win32 app through the store.
This is something that we have been proving
out with some partners over time here,
and we're excited to say that we're making it available to
all Win32 application developers
who publish their apps in the store today.
I'm going to fix the install problem offline here,
but while I was here I noticed I've been given
some bad reviews based on the spelling in the app.
That's really embarrassing, but hey, it happens.
I need to figure out what happened here.
This looks rather suspect
Shen first commit of the year to the resource file.
This is what happens when your manager has rights to your repo.
I bet I'm going to find a bunch of Us here in this
check-in this merge and
yep there we are colors with a U. I'm
vindicated at least it wasn't
my spelling mistake Shen this is all your fault and of course,
a git blame would have given me all that info
anyway so obviously I need to go fix this now.
Now, before I publish this,
I want to talk to you about another cool feature that we're
bringing to Win32 application developers,
and that is the ability to use continuous integration and
continuous delivery from GitHub to
publish your application right in the store.
Now, this is built upon
our store APIs but if you wanted to do this yourself,
you could build this using the same RESTful APIs in the store.
There are three main categories that you would want to look at.
The first is for asset management,
being able to update and manage those assets per language.
The second is updating the metadata for your application
listing. For example, the store listing data, the description,
the markets, the prices,
all of that can be updated through the store metadata.
Then finally and this is the one that we're interested in for
this example is the packages fetch and update.
That enables you to take your application and publish
it into the store and update the packages
into the store as part of that API.
Now that's built upon a simple OAuth authentication mechanism,
which uses Azure Active
Directory for the security there.
Now if you don't have your own Azure Active Directory tenant,
we can provide one for you for free.
Let's take a look. This is the
new action in GitHub marketplace.
It's easy to install in the repo and is configured through
a YAML file which contains your build information,
publishing information, and links to the secrets.
Here's the YAML file I've already uploaded to my repo.
It has a few key sections,
the first is the build section,
which tells the action how to build the project.
In this case, it's a .NET 6 WPF project,
so we're invoking the .NET build tools.
Next is the upload to CDN
step. I've collapsed that to hide the URL,
but it's a step to take your package and upload it to
a version URL that the store can consume for your Win32 app.
Finally, we have the store submission step.
It uses our secrets to hold
the store identifier info and then
update and publish the package.
Of course, since I often test my code in
production we're going right
from check in to publishing here.
Time to fix Shen's spelling.
I see the resx file for en-US has the extra Us in there,
I'll just quickly change those.
Of course, I could just revert his change,
but it's easy enough for me to do this here.
Never let your manager have merge rights in your repo.
I'll just commit this here
right from within Visual Studio, of course,
I need to give it some meaningful comments,
"fixed Shen's,"
wonderful, that's the word I'm going to use,
"UK spelling." there we are all good,
and let's commit this.
Finally, I need to merge this so let's git merge.
Yeah, just have it and let me push it to our main branch.
Now, the really neat thing about this is right at this point,
it's going to kick off that GitHub action,
which is going to build this and publish it to the store,
let's take a look how that's working.
Here we can see the action is queued up and now through
the magic of online edited down demos,
we're going to skip through a lot
of the build steps here and go
right to uploading to the CDN and the publishing.
This is I should mention,
a prerelease action here and it's
likely to change a bit before it hits production,
which will be around the time when you see this.
Now, we've built the app,
it's uploaded into the CDN and
now it's going through the store submission process
and updating that store metadata with the CDN's URL.
It's super simple way to be able to take your stuff directly
from GitHub and get it published in the store for a Win32 app.
I'm really excited to announce
that we're making this continuous integration,
continuous delivery GitHub action available to
Win32 application developers in the store today.
I feel pretty good about my update,
so it's time to take advantage of a feature
we're currently testing and we'll release soon.
Responding to the review in
partner center to let them know that it's all fixed.
This is something that we've previously
made available for other types of apps,
but it's brand new for Win32 apps,
so I'm pretty excited about that.
There we go all sorted.
As you can tell, I'm really excited about
all the great things we're bringing
for Win32 application developers.
I'm hoping that they help you find
your own success in the Microsoft Store on Windows.
Now that my application is in a good place,
I want to go and take advantage of some of
the new features we have for Microsoft ads in the store.
For that, I'm going to turn this over to
Nitah to talk more about it, Nitah.
NITAH HARMON: Thanks, Pete. Hi, everyone.
I'm excited to share with you a new way to
improve the visibility of your app in the Microsoft Store.
We know that getting your app, game, or
other content in the hands of customers is hard,
which is why I'm pleased to announce that we will soon start
testing a new product that will leverage Microsoft advertising,
which is already used by thousands of
advertisers to reach millions of customers worldwide.
Developers will be able to create
and run ad campaigns to target
potential customers who are most likely to find
the apps relevant and useful on the store.
In this part of the breakout,
I want to give you a glimpse into the products that we'll be
testing and making available to more developers in the future.
My app Contoso Suite is an audio
streaming app that has been doing pretty well on the store.
I just launched podcasts on
the platform and I want to increase the awareness of
my app among Windows customers who
like music or other audio content.
To get started, let's head
over to the Microsoft advertising landing page.
You might already be familiar with
this portal and experience if you
leverage Microsoft advertising today
to reach customers on the web.
Here you can see all the ways in
which Microsoft advertising can help my business.
In this case, I want to improve
my app's discoverability on
the Microsoft Store and to drive app downloads,
so I'm going to choose that option.
The new experience you'll see today is
specific to campaigns for the Microsoft Store.
Please stay tuned to the end to learn how to
participate during our testing period.
Once I provide my brand name and details,
Microsoft Store will automatically
sync details about my app to
Microsoft advertising and my app assets will be exported as well.
This means I don't have to provide
creative assets like logos again,
my campaign will use what I provided in
partner center when I published my app to the store.
Next, I will set up a new
campaign for my app Contoso Suite,
I can give it a name and set a budget,
say $25 per day. Since I have other apps in my portfolio,
I can set up different campaign for
all my apps or multiple campaigns for each app.
I can also choose days that I want to run
my campaign and the times I want to display my ad.
This can be particularly helpful if I am introducing an app into
a new market that may be in
a different time zone or if I want to
target customers at a particular time of day.
I know from experience that
Contoso Suite app customers like to use the app in the evenings.
That might be a good time for me to run
my ad to acquire new customers.
I can even make adjustments to
my bid if I don't mind going over budget to get
more customers as I do want more people
to try out our exciting new podcast feature.
Unless I have an app on the store,
I cannot run an ad campaign,
this ensures that customers only see ads for published apps,
games, and content on the store.
Next, I chose my campaign priority,
which can be helpful if I am running many campaigns at once.
I can also choose to promote
all my products or choose specific ones.
Microsoft Store ensures only relevant ads
are showed to customers searching
for content on the store.
In the future, I'll be able to reach
out to potential customers who like music,
entertainment, or audio content
if I am running a campaign for
Contoso Suite and trying to promote my new podcast feature.
Once I'm done, my campaign
will be eligible for the Microsoft Store.
Now, let's go check out what
the experience looks like for customers in the store.
I'm on the Microsoft Store landing page,
I'm going to search for a product
similar to Contoso Suite to see what happens.
Let's say I enter Fabrikam in search box.
No surprise the top such results is Fabrikam, the store
also shows Contoso Suite alongside the best match result.
Improving my discoverability and giving
potential customers a chance to try out the experience.
They also ensure the ad is
relevant to customers, respecting
their privacy if they are minors or
have chosen to opt out of personalized ads.
Once my campaign is live in the store,
I want to understand how it is performing.
Within the Microsoft advertising portal,
I can view impressions,
number of clicks,
click through rate or CTR,
average CPC or cost per click,
and the spend for my campaign among many other insights.
I can also generate these reports for
offline viewing or if I need to share
them with other teams at Contoso.
These campaign performance reports will
help me build a holistic view of
how my campaigns are performing and
take actions to tweak them in the future.
We welcome you to be among the first to test
this exciting new capability to market
your apps to relevant Windows users in Microsoft Store.
You can sign up on our waitlist by visiting aka.ms/newstore,
again, that is aka.ms/newstore.
We hope you enjoyed this session where we shared why the store
is a great platform for you to
attract and engage more customers in Windows.
We talked about some exciting new features for
Win32 app developers and we gave you
a glimpse into new ways in which you
can get in front of the right customers at the right time.
We welcome you to the Microsoft Store,
and I can't wait to see you there.
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