I got a ton of free Nokia phones back in the day through these weird incentive programs. I was told at a meetup by one of the employees that each Microsoft division was to get N number of new apps in their local store each quarter, and they’d have developer programs along the line of “publish 5 Windows Phone apps, get a free Lumia phone.”

There were zero requirements other than publish N number of apps, there was zero form of quality control. I was a freshman in college at the time, could barely code my way out of a leetcode at that point and I’d have five calculator-esque apps ready to go whenever my local Microsoft division dropped a Tweet saying a new program was live since there was only a limited amount of phones.

Felt real good for me and my buddies but ironically we were left with phones that had these junk riddled app stores, amazing hardware devices though.

But yeah, Balmer did great developing the B2B side of things, consumer devices wasn’t it.

To be fair, let's not forget that Google had their apps in there and then got them out. At least the YouTube-like app I used had YouTube premium features at no cost, I guess.

The main 'premium' feature I remember from that app, being the ability to play the audio/video while running another app, and not having restrictions about WHAT you could do that with.

Honestly that's a bullshit feature to lock behind premium, given a PC can do it without.

But then Google more or less gave them the 'fuck you' and made the app unusable. Which I still feel has some antitrust connotations, as they waited until the platform became competent to do so.

Crappy apps might be a problem, but what was a bigger problem was that every major release of the platform came with a new application framework, and developers would have to pick between using the old framework to keep existing customers and live with suboptimal experience on new devices, use the new one and drop support for old devices, or spend even more effort on supporting both (or really all three). Compare to iOS, where most users update to latest OS within months, or desktop Windows where win32 works for everything, or Android where version gated features don't usually require massive changes to enable.

It would have been nice if they didn't copy Apple so hard, leaving out copy and paste and restricting browsers in the store weren't the best decisions for an upstart platform. Mozilla had been excited to port Firefox early on, but Microsoft told them no, so WP users were stuck with Mobile IE and much later in WM10, the amazingly worse Mobile Edge.

Yeah I remember hearing that announcement about incentives and thought it was obvious that crappy apps would come to dominate the store. Two things would’ve made the App Store better:

- First-party apps using the same SDK as third-party apps. This would’ve forced the third-party sdk to be awesome from the beginning, but it also would’ve delayed the launch of WP7 by at least 4-6 months. It wasn’t until a couple years later that some first-party apps switched to the public sdk and improvements were made, but by then it was too late.

- Google allowing us to build official apps for YouTube and maps. We even offered to build and maintain it, but they simply refused to allow those apps to exist on our platform.

I still had a wonderful time working on the product 2008-2012, but it’s really a shame WP never made it as a viable third platform.