Microsoft Promises to Improve Windows Phone Marketplace

Shortly after Microsoft announced it would soon close access to Marketplace to all non-Mango Windows Phone devices, the company came forward with an official statement outlining how it should improve its applications store.

Although Windows Phone Marketplace is still way behind iOS and Android stores when it comes to the number of apps, Microsoft is ambitiously trying to raise the quality bar of all the apps submitted.

In order to make Windows Phone users’ experience much smoother when browsing the Marketplace, Microsoft plans to take four steps that will help save users time and reduce the risk of having apps pulled for developers.

Firstly, Microsoft is going to investigate any trademark or copyright violation submitted by a developer, more often and much faster. Although most of these violations are unintentional, it requires a certain amount of time and money to be solved.

According to Microsoft, all these can be avoided if developers read the company’s content policy along with a related Q&A, before submitting their applications.

Secondly, developers who submit a high number of similar apps at the same time and place them in different categories will have it removed from the catalog. In addition, the Marketplace tile image for each application must be unique and reflect the main features of that app.

Thirdly, due to the fact that lots of developers are violating Marketplace policy by entering more than five keywords for each of their application, Microsoft decided to enforce this rule for all current and future Windows Phone apps.

How is this going to be enforced? Simple, all apps exceeding five keywords in App Hub will have all their keywords removed completely. However, those who developed these apps will be notified and allowed to enter five new keywords.

Last but not least, Microsoft plans to refine its approach to content policy enforcement. This will affect all apps that are “racy” or sexual in nature. Basically, the company will pay more attention to icons, title and content of these apps and make them less provocative in order to fit them to a new standard.

These changes will be applied in the following weeks and are meant to turn Windows Phone Marketplace into a much more cleaner and easier to browse application store.