Stephansen Consulting

From a developer perspective the Marketplace have some serious issues about upgrading applications. I´ll try to describe my experiences and thoughts.

Additional markets
Due to the fact that applications on the Marketplace needs to be translated into the local language of each market, I got my Contact Changer translated into several new languages. I´m not going to write much about my opinion about this ridiculous limitation but concentrate on how to avoid loosing ratings, reviews and your most popular listings.

The first successful submission of Contact Changer (v1.0) supported norwegian and english. The application was first submitted to the norwegian market and was later published to UK, USA, Singapore and Canada as additional markets. The new version (1.1) also includes swedish, danish, dutch, german and french.

I´ve been following the Marketplace developer forum at MSDN and I noticed that developers reported that their reviews and most popular listings were reset when they upgraded their applications. As my Contact Changer has positive reviews and placed on the most popular list in the norwegian store I could not make up my mind. Would it be profitable to upgrade? Would the new additional markets outnumber the sales I got from being on the most popular list and the positive reviews?

When I looked at the developer dashboard at Marketplace I noticed that all the markets had their own “Upgrade” menu item in the product listing. That´s when I decided to try to upgrade the least successful market to the new version, and then expand with additional markets from the newly upgraded “additional market”.
I submitted the 1.1 upgrade to Singapore, which is my least successful market with under 10 downloads and no reviews. The update was approved. Later i published the upgraded version to France, Netherlands and Germany.

Even though I got away without loosing any reviews, ratings or listings I find it very frustrating. My application is now on the Marketplace in two different versions. 1.0 for Norway, USA, UK and Canada and 1.1 for Singapore, Germany, France and the Netherlands. If I plan to expand with more languages I have to do the same thing again….So if I include italian and polish in my next build and upgrade Singapore to v1.2 , I´ve got three different versions out there! And I don´t want to increase the minor version number for each new language!

And after a while when Singapore has been upgraded to version 1.9 I have to upgrade another market to 1.1 (an update from 1.9 to 2.0 costs a submission credit worth $99)! That makes it even harder to keep track of my versions. Two 1.1 versions with different executables!? Microsoft, what are you thinking!?

Update with new features
So far I´ve written about upgrading with additional languages. Another huge disadvantage with Marketplace is upgrading all your markets to a new version! Let´s say you publish your application to 30 markets. That costs you a submission credit (worth $99) for the first market and 30 x $10 for the additional markets. $399 in total….!!

After a while you get feedback from users about new features that you would love to implement in your application. You spend hours developing and testing the new version and you are finally ready to publish the upgrade! So far so good….. You log into the developer dashboard and submit your upgrade. In a few days your upgrade is approved and published – to 1 of 30 markets! You have to repeat this for each market and submit the exact same CAB each time. You would spend a whole day publishing your update, what a waste of time…And as an extra award (for giving your users new features) all your ratings, reviews and most popular listings are reset!

Compared to the AppStore it feels like Marketplace was designed in 1980. I recently updated my iPhone application with new features. Reviewed in 6 days and distributed to the whole world in 1 second! Come on Microsoft, I bet you can do better!