Let me bring you up to speed with something that’s been happening with the new Windows Marketplace. It’s arrived on WinMo 6.5-powered devices and there’s already a very easy way for everyone else to get it too. There’s a problem though, and it was one that was highlighted in the first few days of operation. Across the Twitter airwaves we spotted that some people were seeing just a couple of dozen apps, some were seeing more, some were seeing less. It didn’t make sense, but then it slowly became apparent that Microsoft had decided to do some rather restrictive localization with their store.
To make matters worse it’s not just you guys who lose out – when submitting an app to the Marketplace the developers have to pay an extra $10 with each country, plus the app must be fully localized – language and everything. The developers can’t just submit an English language app to countries like France and Germany.
According to theunwired.net, Microsoft are aware of the issue and say that it wasn’t possible to fix “this behaviour” in the current build. An employee said that, “A solution (will be introduced) to allow the end-user to switch Marketplaces”. It’s not an ideal solution – more of a workaround really – but at least Microsoft are aware of this issue. Hopefully it’ll be fixed soon, because it’s penalising developers and reducing choice for customers.
Update – We should mention this hack to get around the localization problems (thanks Noonski)
Link – theunwired.net
The Windows Marketplace problems
October 9, 2009