I opened the Microsoft Store and had a look at the top 50 items in "most popular". It includes items with such mainstream appeal as the Windows Terminal, Ubuntu 20.04 and the VMWare client.

The most popular app is Roblox. It has 164 reviews. The second most popular app is Spotify. It has 57 reviews. On Android, it has 19 million reviews. Their Android TV app even has 200. The item with the most reviews is Minecraft, with 1000 reviews. On Android it has 3.5 million.

I think they only show reviews from people in your region. I can see 325 reviews on Spotify, 15k reviews on Minecraft.

The author of krita mentioned in this thread that their revenue is 50/50 steam and windows store, so it can't be that bad.

The Microsoft store also lets you install free apps with out logging in (if you keep clicking out from the login prompts) so it's probably also harder to get reviews.

While I agree that the windows store is used more than some people might think, it is used nowhere near as much as the Play or App Store are, and is nowhere near as import for Windows as the others are for their respective platforms.

Of course it is! For the vast majority of users, the Play or App Store is the only possible way to install software.

Of course the difficulty and headaches involved with windows package management are pretty asinine, they at least are an accessible and non-gated platform for both the developer and user, which can't be said for Android and iOS/MacOS.

It's probably higher than you think for consumers, mostly due to XBox/Minecraft.

Enterprises? Forget it.

Which is partly Microsoft's fault because Enterprises should have easily embraced the Microsoft Store for Business (emphasis on the "for Business" as a part of the name following one of Microsoft's more confusing name patterns; it's a separate more customizable "store front" than the "not for Business" consumer store): it's a lot nicer UX than System Center's "just ported from Silverlight" Vista-era ugliness, has more features than System Center (including easier license management for applications sold on the non-Business store), and better install technology. In one of Microsoft's many "forgot to build a bridge" problems with the Store, they forgot to provide easy upgrades from System Center, especially for the then (too many) companies still supporting Windows 7 side-by-side Windows 10 installs up until the security support deadline.

It's probably still too early to tell, but App Management for Microsoft Teams, updates to MSIX, and better Windows 7 compatibility for companies over-paying EOL extended security support agreements, at least for Microsoft/Office 365 companies, has opened the door to enterprises re-evaluating the Microsoft Store for Business. It might actually replace System Center like it was intended to, just years late.

I imagine the Windows Store gets billions in revenue, but much like Microsoft's claims about the great success of their cloud offering (where they hilariously count Office 365 as cloud revenue to compare against AWS and GCC) the overwhelming bulk will be people upgrading to paid Office accounts.

The .NET bit is an irrelevant strawman. We aren't talking about that, and it has zero relevance.

The Windows App Store is a sad disaster.