[This section is featured in Develop great apps for Windows 8.]
Windows 8 offers the single largest potential market for your apps. This unprecedented reach, combined with our flexible business models and transparent approval process, provides an unmatched revenue opportunity for your apps.
Broad reach, flexibility, and transparency of the Windows Store
Windows 8 and the Windows Store make it simple for millions of customers to find, try, and buy high-quality, certified apps from practically anywhere in the world. The Windows Store makes it easy to distribute, update, and get paid for the apps that you develop.
Designed for discovery
The Windows Store is designed to ensure the visibility and discoverability of apps. The Windows Store features minimal chrome, so apps are center stage. Discoverability mechanisms, like search, category browse, rankings, and editorial curating help users find your apps. Landing pages are designed to surface compelling apps, and categories like New releases, Top paid, Top free, and Rising stars help organize the catalog.
The Windows Store catalog is indexed by search engines, so apps are easy to find. Web search results point to a web version of the app listing page, which is based on the same content as the Windows Store listing. Promoting apps from your website is easy. In fact, with just a line of markup, you can promote your app via the app button within the browser, visible to anyone running Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8.
Selling in a global marketplace
The Windows Store supports the distribution of free and paid apps in hundreds of markets worldwide, so most customers can find and install the apps they want in the language of their choice. The Windows Store supports market-specific catalogs, tailored for customers in specific locales, as well as market-specific payment providers. You can choose the catalogs in which your app is listed.
Flexible business models
The Windows Store provides you with the freedom to choose the business model that’s right for your apps. The Store provides full platform support for free apps, trials (both time-based and feature-based), and paid apps, as well as in-app purchases. You’re free to manage customer transactions directly using your own or third-party services for in-app purchases and subscriptions, or use the services provided by the Windows Store. For apps that are supported by ads, you’re free to choose the ad platform that best meets your goals.
Transparent terms and onboarding process
To help ensure predictability and eliminate uncertainty, app certification requirements are provided in plain language. The Windows App Certification Kit lets you test your apps for many issues prior to submission. If your app is rejected, you’ll get useful feedback so you can address the issues quickly and resubmit your app for publication. And you’ll know where your app is at every step of the certification process, from upload to final certification and acceptance, using the dashboard.
Your personal app dashboard
The Windows Dev Center provides a dashboard that includes many ways to improve your apps by monitoring their success. View reports on downloads, revenue, aggregate usage, in-app transactions, customer ratings, market trends, and crash and hang data.
You can access reports and telemetry data that show failure-based and cause-centric data and that indicate how reliable your products are in the field, including how often they crash or hang. You can also compare how well your app is doing in terms of sales, downloads, and usage compared to other similar apps (no personal or company information is revealed). These new reports are consistent and actionable so you can find issues quickly and efficiently.
Best economics
Windows 8 represents the single biggest platform opportunity available, and business terms of the Windows Store represent a developer-first point of view. The registration fee for individuals is $49 USD, with a $99 USD fee for companies. The revenue share is 70%, but when an app achieves $25,000 USD in revenue—aggregated across all sales in every market—that changes to 80% revenue share for the rest of the lifetime of the app.
With access to millions of potential customers around the world, development choices that let you use the skills you already have, rich platform capabilities for building Windows Store apps, business terms that maximize your revenue opportunity, and flexible business models for the apps you create, Windows 8 and the Windows Store provide an unprecedented opportunity for you to imagine, build, and sell your apps.
Build date: 3/7/2013
