It seems as though Microsoft isn’t eager to bolster it’s app marketplace with excessive apps. One of the biggest knocks on Windows Phone 7 is the lack of apps in the marketplace, with currently around 30,000 applications. There seems to be a scam where a select few app developers are submitting several apps in bulk to manipulate the “new” tab in the app marketplace. Microsoft is now limiting developers to submitting 10 apps a day.
Basically a “small number of developers” are publishing apps in bulk in order to push out other new applications from the very popular new app category. Doing so gives those app developers an unfair advantage. This actually isn’t a new problem for Microsoft, earlier this year they limited the number of apps a single developer could submit in a single day to 20. The goal of the scam is to submit several very similar apps at the same time, the developers in question are not submitting unique apps in bulk.
Microsoft is taking a pretty tough stand against these rogue developers by stating the possible penalities for breaking the new rule, “This may include the unpublishing of apps, and in extreme cases, temporary or permanent suspension of an offending developer’s Marketplace credentials.” The new rule takes effect on Friday September 30.
Currently WP7’s app ecosystem is far behind those of Android and iOS. There are currently around 30,000 WP7 apps, 425,000 iOS apps, and 225,000 Android apps available. While WP7 may have some good apps, it does lack in the volume category. Microsoft would love to boost it’s total number of Apps, but it wants to do so honestly, and not through developers cheating the system. With the Mango update already rolling out, and new hardware on the way we fully expect to see the WP7 app ecosystem to continue to grow.
We aren’t quite sure why exactly app developers need to submit 10 apps a day. It seems to us that 10 apps is still an inflated number, and most developers would be more than happy to submit a single app a day.
