The need for a different Marketplace

My grandmother always said that in the first day of a new year you should do what you would like to do the rest of the year. Even if the last year I didn't had a lot of time to blog I always wanted to so here I am wanting to start the year with my blog.

So what is wrong with the current version of the Marketplace? I could say nothing really, but there is so much that could be improved/changed. I am referring here to the marketplace of all major mobile platforms: Android, iOS and Windows Phone. They are more or less the same. Right now I have experience as a developer with Windows Phone marketplace and as a customer/consumer with all three of them. The marketplace was/is one of the greatest marketing/selling instrument in the software industry. In theory it gives the opportunity to everyone to sell their ideas/software all over the world. I say in theory because it enables developers to do that, but it doesn't make it easy.

One of the biggest problems I see for the moment is the number of applications. I am looking at the Microsoft "race" to catch up with the number of applications in the marketplace. In this race the number is the priority and the quality comes second. The result of this race is that the marketplace get filled with "junk". It is the same situation on all the three platforms, but today the analysts judge the success of a platform by the number of apps in the marketplace. Let's face it there are 500.000 application in the Apple marketplace and, maybe, not even 10% are quality apps. When I say junk I say applications that don't bring any innovation, written as fast as possible and thrown into the wild just to have an application out there. From my experience (I have a small application in the marketplace) in order to have a decent application there is a lot of work to be done in developing and maintaining it. Having so many applications in the marketplace "kills" the opportunity marketplace gives you if you have a quality app because it makes it almost invisible. If today you have a quality app and you publish it will be there with (I will take the Windows Phone marketplace numbers published by http://wp7applist.com/en-US/stats/ today 01.01.2012) other 451 applications published the same day. Does you application stand any chance? Some will say yes, I would say the more apps are in the marketplace the harder will be. You can only count on the people that are trying new applications. So inevitable a quality app will go down (maybe a little bit slower ) with the others and you have to find other methods to get it "visible". Another consequence of having a lot of applications published every day without a quality check is the degrade in the service offered to developers. I remember that when I wrote this post: http://sviluppomobile.blogspot.com/2011/01/windows-phone-marketplace-more.html the quality of certification the service was great. Things changed a little in the last two months (I think they had an increase in the number of applications to certify) the certification time jumped from two days to more than a week. More frustrating is seeing applications like this one published in "bulk":

So is it worth having thousands of applications without any quality filter (just rules on how to write your app)? I would prefer a quality marketplace, but maybe having both is better. It's like when you go to the market to shop: if you want products that cost less you go in one place, if you want quality products you go to another shop, if you just need one product you go in the first shop you find. The marketplace in the marketplace could improve a little bit on the quality part. It would need quality reviewers that would select the apps for the "quality" marketplace. It is easier than to go on all review websites and look for top applications on each platform. A place in the marketplace where you go when you don't know what you really want but you would like to try some quality applications. Apple, Google and Microsoft should not be the quality reviewers but continue to do what they do and then the best reviewers/websites on each platform should intersect their chosen applications (easy to say and hard to do). It is not a bullet proof mechanism.

Other suggestion regards the reviews specifically bad reviews. In this moment if you want to make a concurrent application go down you just go and slowly start to make bad reviews in all the marketplaces. (it is a situation I am dealing with). I would suggest that, if someone makes a bad review and give one or two stars, he should be "forced" to write a reason. This should help the developers understand the problem, and, if it's not true at least ask the review to be removed. Also the reviews should be disabled when the application is hidden. For the hidden applications the reviews don't make any sense.

Being able to publish a beta version of the application in the marketplace is an awesome feature, but in this moment, for me is almost useless. You have to find your beta testers, but it is a difficult task. So there should be an "open" beta option. This way anybody that wants to test the beta and has a link to it can do it with a limit of 100 users (more or less like the hidden apps but limited to a number of users).

In my opinion 2011 was a great year for Windows Phone even if the market shares don't reflect it . The 7.5 version is a great step forward and I hope that 2012 will bring us another big step. I still think that the application list is "ugly" and not really usable, we need some way to group applications (maybe an evolution of the "folder" concept).

I really hope Microsoft will make Apollo an EVOLUTION and not a REVOLUTION.

Happy New Year to all my readers! A better year to everyone.

NAMASTE

Windows Phone 7 Marketplace What to expect

  We all know that the actual version of Windows Phone 7 Marketplace can be better and that a new version is coming. As a registered developer with an active application on the marketplace I've been invited to compile a survey on the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace. The survey had a very interesting part where you select what you would like to included in the next version of the Marketplace. Here is the list with what might come in the next version of the Marketplace. If you see items that are doubled it's because the system they used for evaluating was to cycle on the same answers where you select which one is the most important and which one is the least important in groups of 4:

1. Real-time app download information: "Watch number of app downloads in real time (no delay). App downloads are categorized by user market, device and mobile operator.
2. Annual paid subscriptions for technical support: "You can buy a paid subscription for advanced technical support."
3. App emulator: "Users can check out a full version of the app in a browser window, prior to downloading or purchasing."
4. Web marketplace: "An online web marketplace for users to browse the app catalog and make purchases; apps downloaded/purchased on the web marketplace show up instantly on their phones without the need to tether to the PC or perform any user action."
5. Easy app updates: "The App Hub will retain metadata, artwork and descriptions from prior versions and make it easier to submit updates."
6. Paid featured slots: "Bid money for a featured app slot within the web and phone marketplace clients. Featured slots are assigned based on a real-time auction to the highest bidder."
7. Early access to updates: "Developers will have early access to OS upgrades to help them update their apps to take advantage of new features."
8. Flexible pricing: "This will enable developers to price your app differently in different markets and also have more price tiers to choose from."
9. Private distribution of apps: "Apps can be published hidden in the marketplace, so only users with a special deeplink are able to download the app. This can be used for private distribution scenarios where you don't want your app to show up in the general catalog."
10. More intuitive category structure: "Changes to the category structure to make it more intuitive, add additional categories like education etc."
11. Respond to user reviews: "View and respond to user reviews. Draft responses to user reviews from your App Hub account without seeing the real user email address. Users receive your response and can optionally come back and change their review."
12. App gifting: "Allow users to gift apps to other users, paying on their behalf. The gift recipient gets an email with instructions on how to redeem the app."
13. Role-based developer accounts: "Multiple user accounts can be created to manage your AppHub account, with different permissions. For example, one account could have permissions for viewing download/payout reports (your finance manager) but no permissions for submitting or editing existing apps. Another account could have permissions to submit apps or edit metadata, but no access to reporting."
14. Additional payment methods like PayPal: "Ability to pay App Hub fees with PayPal. Ability to buy apps or in app purchases using PayPal."
15. Discount offers/coupons: "Ability to generate and offer a discount coupon to users (x% or $x off) for app promotions, etc. Users can enter the coupon code during checkout. Coupons can be unique (one time use only) and have an expiration date. Coupons can be easily generated from your App Hub account."
16. In-app commerce: "Ability to charge users a small amount of money from within the application. This can be used for selling extra content (e.g. a new game level, accessories) or unlocking new app functionality."
17. Screen capture tool: "Tool for capturing the right size (480x800) screenshots off the emulator or a phone tethered to the PC."
18. Video content in-app description: "Ability to upload videos to showcase app for users to see from PC or web interface while browsing the catalog."
19. App analytics: "Get real-time information on number of application runs, active users, app installs and uninstalls, etc. to understand how often your app is being used."
20. Simplified identity validation: "A simplified identity validation process that will be based on your credit card details and/or email verification."
21. More frequent payouts: "We will lower the payout threshold and so you will receive your payouts more frequently ."

 All are great features. Let's hope they will implement all of them

NAMASTE

Windows Phone Marketplace: More frustration

   I wanted to do this post for quite a while, but never found the time. Hope that someone from Microsoft will have the patience to read this post and take some action. 

    In my opinion the current version of the Windows Phone Marketplace reflects the state of WP7 platform ... unfinished, rushed on the market. Some time ago I wrote a post about the development platform and said that it's frustrating that "normal" developers don't have access to resources that are already present on the platform like: sockets, camera stream, database. The Windows Phone Marketplace is even more frustrating and I experienced that both as individual developer and company account . So let's take it step by step:

1. Registration

  As a company we were already registered as Windows Mobile developers. When Microsoft updated the Marketplace we had to update our account and something went wrong when the XBox account was generated because it was located in USA instead of Italy. This made impossible the publication of any application as the developer website went into error. We contacted Microsoft support and after almost one week the only solution was to generate/subscribe a new account.

  As an individual when subscribing the Developer Program on the same webpage there were 2 prices "Abbonamento annuale Hub App € 99,00" and "L'abbonamento annuale di € 80,00IVA inclusa" but when I received the message from the credit card the real price was €113,85. 

2. Publisher Certification

   I know that Geotrust is responsible for the certification but they represent Microsoft in this process so it's Microsoft that has to do something to improve this service.

  Company account: after waiting for 3-4 days, as we had our application ready for more than two weeks, we contacted them directly. The first time they said that everything was ok and that we will have the account certified the same day. As we had no answer we had to contact them again after two more days in order to finally have the account enabled

  With my personal account was even worst.I have subscribed the Developer program on 24th of Nov. 2010, then received an email on 26th of Nov 2010 that they needed a document that I have sent the same day. Geotrust answered on 3rd of Dec 2010 that they have received the document and they will complete the verification process shortly. I wrote to them on the 3rd of Jan. 2011 asking why my account was not activated and they finally activated the account on 4th of Jan 2011 :).

3. Publication

  This part is not so bad but can be improved. If you submit an application/update but you find a bug it is impossible to cancel the submission even if it's not have been tested. On one hand it's quite normal, but as time is money if the developer finds a bug why not stop the process right away meaning Microsoft won't loose time to test an application that won't pass certification and the developer won't have to wait for the certification to fail in order to be able to submit an updated xap. The alternative would be to create and submit a new application but if you don't pay attention you will end up with two applications on the Marketplace. This happened to me with BoxFiles. I then wanted to split the applications (one for US and the other for the other markets) but this meant that some users won't be able to update the application they bought because if you bought an application that is updated but not available anymore on your Marketplace you won't be able to update. So I've decided to let both of them.

    I have to make compliments to the testing team. They are really well organized and you will usually get an answer in one or two days. This is the only part of the Marketplace that I can say it's great (even if my latest update was postponed because the Dropbox service was not working for 30 min so they could not login or create a new account).

4. Updates 

   The bad part about updates is that it is impossible to write the update text. The user will see that there is an update, but you cannot communicate what is new in this release

5.Reviews

   The first thing that I don't like is the fact that a user can write more than one review. A user should be able to update his review but this should erase his old review (now both of them will be visible). I don't like it because if a user changed his opinion changing it from bad to good a possible buyer will be influenced by the bad review even if the user that wrote the bad review now has another opinion.

   Another aspect is that nobody verifies the reviews. For example one of the bad reviews of my app states that the search section freezes even if, in the old version, there is no search section (1.7 will have it :) ). Another user said that it cannot login in trial version and he will not buy the app even if, for writing an app review, you will have to buy it. It looks like some users are having "fun" trying to make the applications of the others look bad instead of trying to make their applications look good and the Marketplace helps them.

   I also think that the algorithm for calculating an application rate could be improved. I might be mistaken but in this moment is a mean value from all the reviews of an app which, in my opinion, is not reflecting the "state" of the app. I will explain why: an user usually, if everything works, won't take time to do a good review. On the other hand if an application does't work you will be angry and you will do a bad review.  If the developer fixes the things the users that wrote a negative review will usually not take the time to write a positive review. So it would be more fair to calculate an application rating using an weighted average by the application version number. If the first version had many bad reviews and the next one have very good ones but not as many they should count more in the rating as they reflect more precise the actual state of the app. 

6. Security

   I let for last the worst of them all. This part is very shameful for Microsoft. A company that teaches Security Best Practices has such a BIG HOLE in their system and they are not patching it. At the start Microsoft was warned that anybody can download any xap directly from Microsoft Marketplace but Microsoft did NOTHING and there are programs circulating on the web that are able to download xaps directly from the Microsoft Marketplace (just search WP7 3MktPlace). It's shameful not because the Marketplace has a bug/hole but it's shameful because Microsoft is not patching it right away. This means that Microsoft has no consideration for developers. Developers are trusting Microsoft giving their intellectual property for selling and when a bug enables anybody to download any xap Microsoft doesn't take action. I remembered that Paul Thurrott wrote a blog post where he was frustrated by the fact that Microsoft is releasing software for the iPhone while Apple in the first three months of the iOS  released four updates to their OS patching bugs and adding new features. Instead of using their developers for iOS Microsoft should use all their forces to get WP7 a valid alternative to Android and iOS. I know that NoDo will lock the possibility to sideload applications on WP7 but if it will still be possible to download any xap from the Marketplace Microsoft will encourage Intellectual Theft as it will be possible to use Reflector to see how an app it's done. Of course Microsoft will say that you can use an obfuscator to protect your xap, but why justify a security problem with a workaround? It is enough to patch the hole: authenticate the download of the xap using the windows live id and verify if the user can download a certain xap.

    Another thing that I've noted is that you see everywhere on twitter/blogs that WP7 has more than 20.000 developers and there are 7.000 apps on the marketplace. Let's say that we have an average of 1.5 apps per publisher so we have 4,666 "active" publishers. Let's round it to 5.000 meaning that only 25% of the developers "concludes" the publishing process. In my opinion this means that developers need more. I really hope there is more in NoDo for developers other than Copy/Paste and speed. There are so many things still missing.

NAMASTE!

WP7 Device The End of the First Contact

            Today I got an email from Microsoft Italia telling me that I have to send back the test device :(. I think the main reason is that I was not able to deliver an App in short time, but it's not like I didn't tried. September was a crazy month with all my client coming back from holidays and start calling so the only time I had to develop was at night so the results were not as I expect them to be . Anyway I improved a lot the multi-language module (I will post later on the blog the new version) and the app for the Marketplace is UNDER CONSTRUCTION. I wish I had more time to test/improve the sqlite library, the barcode library, but guess I will have to wait and buy a device. 

             So this concludes my first contact with a Windows Phone 7 device. It was short (2 weeks), but intense :). I used it as a daily phone and the overall experience was good. There are some things that I would want them different:

1. This is the one that bothered me the most: when you are in a call the End call window doesn't cover all the display and the End call button is almost at the bottom of it and too small. The bad part is that a lot of times (especially when I was driving) I pressed a region lower than the button so instead of ending the call it went to the background and had to bring it back by pressing the title
2. When reading the emails (especially the unread ones) and delete a message the phone brings you back to the list with all the messages instead I would like to automatically go to the next email in the list.
3. The right arrow in the main screen "eats" a lot of vertical space. That space is completely wasted. It would be much better to take it out and navigate from Home screen to Application List using the Windows button. Maybe three tiles in a row on the homescreen would not be a bad idea.
4. I really miss the Call and End Call hardware buttons.It is true that you have the OnScreen buttons, but you have to look at the screen and then press End Call button which is not very "intuitive" for a person that did not used an iPhone (my mom left the phone opened for 20 minutes because she did not pressed the end call button)
5. It would be nice to be able to enable/disable WiFi and Bluetooth from the Homescreen this way you won't have to go to Start->Applications->Settings->Wifi ->Enable/Disable or Start->Settings->WiFi->Enable/Disable if you pinned Settings to start screen. It's something I used a lot in order to save battery power.
6. Bing doesn't search inside your contacts, emails or calendars. You can however use search inside People hub and inside each of the inboxes (using bing search on the phone it would enable to search emails on all your inboxes in only one search). You cannot search inside your calendar that would be pretty useful feature (let's say you don't remember someone's birthday date)
7. I miss the possibility to search a contact using the phone keyboard and not the extended one (the t9 search). The keyboard is great but I was used to search contacts with the onscreen phone keyboard in Windows Mobile
8. Still hate the application list. It is as unusable as I thought it would be. Everything is in alphabetical order without possibility to reorder items so if you are a developer you should use the first letters of the alphabet to name your app this way you have a good probability to have it in the first screen of the application list.
9. Need to add pdf read capability to emails. This is a MUST but I think it will be available at launch as the email app already takes you to the marketplace to download the reader that, for the moment, it's not available.  
10. Office is not a theme aware application. If you use light or dark themes it doesn't change and it is light :)

What are the 7 :) things  I loved about WP7:

1. Touchscreen experience 
2. Fluid user interface 
3. Great keyboard and loved that you can use more than one language keyboard at the same time
4. One tile for each email account
5. One calendar to rule them all, one calendar to find them all, one calendar to bring them all and in the darkness bind them :) - depends if your theme is dark or light
6. Notifications
7. Great development tools 

What I didn't test and used:

1. Music and video
2. Xbox Live
3. Pictures

The success of the platform will depend a lot on the apps in the Marketplace so if you are a developer try to be there from the start. 

NAMASTE

WP7 Marketplace Limit download size over 3G

I was looking at the Teched sessions and one of the aspects that cut my interest was the limit for application download using 3G network (maximum 20MB). It's a choice that Apple made and from my experience with the end user they are loosing clients for some applications. For example A friend of mine that owns an iPhone, uses it, loves it but is not able to connect it to a PC via iTunes. It's not said that somebody that will own a WP7 will also know how to connect it to a PC (it's a sad reality but it's like this). A lot of people will buy a "trendy" phone but don't know how to use a PC, or more are not interested in connecting the phone to the pc.
Another scenario would be that I am in a town, don't have a car navigator but I need to arrive in some place in town and I don't have an internet connection besides the one my WP7. In this case I would happily pay 40Euro to download TomTom with Italy map and I would wait 5-10 minutes to download it (download size around 400MB).
So why "block" the user buy applications that they are interested/need it? The price in Italy for unlimited data traffic it's really small (Tim Italy offers unlimited unlimited data transfer from for just 2 Euro/week but only from the phone)? Ericsson declared that the world wide data traffic over the cellular network surpassed the voice traffic.
If battery it's a problem wait for the user to connect the power plug. I personally would prefer not to power up my pc, connect the phone and download the application especially if it doesn't matter if I download using 3G or ADSL. You are also cutting off the users that don't have internet at home but have the latest phone on the market in their pockets and those are the users for which the price doesn't really matter.

The only reason I can think of is if the voice provider Vodafone, T-Mobile is imposing a maximum download size (it would be strange, but also in that case I cannot believe that all the providers have the same conditions).


So my way would be WARN THE USER but if he agrees DON'T LIMIT HIM

Namaste