Win 8 app store revealed: more money for devs, beta in late February![windows-8-store-4eded09-intro-thumb-640xauto-28320.png]()
In San Francisco today, Microsoft started talking up the Windows Store, the online marketplace for Metro-style Windows 8 applications. [...]
The Windows Store will support both free and paid applications, with paid applications ranging from $1.49 to $999. [...]
But money is, for many developers, the most important feature of any online store. The Windows Store will take a 30 percent cut of application sales, just like Apple's store. However, if you have a major application that becomes a hit, the terms become more favorable. Once an application reaches $25,000 in revenue, Microsoft's cut drops to 20 percent. [...] Independent developers will at least be able to register a little more cheaply: individuals will pay $49 to register, companies pay $99.
Of course, you can't make any money if there are no users, and at the moment, Windows 8 of course has no users. Microsoft was keen to stress just how big the Windows market actually is—claiming 1.25 billion PCs total, and 500 million Windows 7 licenses shipped compared with 247 million Android devices, 152 million iOS devices, and 30 million Macs in the same period. Should Windows 8 be as big a success as Windows 7, it will rapidly become a desirable platform to target.
Windows is available worldwide, and the same will be true of the store: it will be available in 231 markets, more than 100 languages, with purchases in 58 currencies. Payments to developers will be made in any one of 31 currencies.
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The company also described enterprise store features. Access to the store can be removed or restricted by IT administrators, and enterprises can deploy their own Metro-style applications without going through the store.
Finally, Microsoft announced that the store would become available concurrently with the release of the Windows 8 beta—and that's currently scheduled for late February. Microsoft has described the Windows 8 development process as similar to that of Windows 7, with a preview release, a single beta, and then a single release candidate, instead of the multiple betas and release candidates seen with previous Windows releases. This may be so, but the February release hints that the major Windows 8 release is taking a bit longer than Windows 7 did; the Windows 7 beta was released in early Januaury at CES 2009.