[Windows 10] Prevent your app from being hidden on Windows Store
Over the past few months the Windows Store has been cleaning house, dropping junk apps and pushing good apps into the featured slots. However, according to quite a few developers in Vietnam, the Store has been executing a fair number of good apps from Vietnamese devs and devs in other countries. So what do you do?
This post gives you the information and suggestions to keep your app on the store forever, showing in search and climbing to the top.
1. Your app, your content, your images, your idea
You created this app, and you own all the content in it — images, music, video, and so on and so forth. Sharing an idea with another app doesn’t matter much here, but you have to be sure your app is better than “the neighbor’s kid” app, and that the neighbor’s kid hasn’t copyrighted that idea.
For example, say you build an app that manages facebook Pages. Then you slap the facebook logo on it. Maybe in the past the person reviewing apps for the Store didn’t bother with this, but today it’s different: your app fails immediately. And other apps on the Store in the same situation get taken down too.
Another case: your app is fine, the images are Free, the content is entirely your own creation, but the name has words that can be misunderstood. This is exactly what happened to one of my apps. Here is the link to the App: https://www.microsoft.com/store/apps/9nblggh5zchk. At first I named this app “Windows Universal Logo Maker”. Fail, fail and fail. In the end I messaged the tester to ask, and they replied that the words “Windows Universal” would make users think this app was an official Windows 10 app published by Microsoft, and they also suggested I rename it to “Universal Logo Maker for Windows” -> passed instantly.
Another small note: not only the app name, but all the other information in the App description has to describe that app’s features, with no words belonging to other famous apps aimed at farming views, likes or searches for your app.
Give and take. If your app is genuinely good, with unique content that creates real value for users, over time your app climbs to the top of the search results — sometimes just typing the keyword makes the app appear right in the suggestion box.
Recommendation: use the Universal Logo Maker for Windows app to create your App’s Icon set in the blink of an eye.
2. A good and unique app
There are hundreds of thousands of apps on the Store. When the tricks for farming views, likes and searches stop working, what do you do to get users to find and download your app?
The answer comes from your app’s logo, screenshots and features. The nicer, more unique and more useful to users it is, the higher the chance they find it. There is a fun term for this phenomenon: “the snowball effect”. Good app -> more users use it -> they recommend it to others -> more positive Reviews -> even easier to find on the Store -> even more users
For example, if you build a Calculator app with only the basic features that every other Calculator app has, then 99% of the time nobody will bother with your Calculator, because those other Calculator apps sit at the top of the store and users will pick those.
3. Build 1 good app instead of a dozen similar small ones
Say you build a racing game for a dozen different markets. Each market gets its own language. That easily leads to all those look-alike apps failing at once. Instead, if you build 1 app whose language changes based on the market, your app stays safely on the store, in search, and so on and so forth.
Small apps:
Combined into a big app with a language picker, or one that follows the operating system’s current language
4. Keep your Windows Dev Center profile in good shape
The last thing I want to tell the Devs out there is to always try to submit high quality apps to the Store. Before building any app, search the Store to see whether a similar app already exists, to avoid the cases above. This is like a bank loan profile. The “cleaner” you are, the higher the chance your app reaches the top.
5. If the app doesn’t show up on the Store after a successful submission
Try waiting another 24 hours. An app usually appears on the Store via the direct link about 24 hours after a successful submission. And it takes about 8-24 hours to show up in the search results.
If you wait and it still doesn’t appear, you can request support at: support ticket
6. If the app is hidden — direct link only, not searchable on the Store
Carefully re-check the suggestions above, make sure your app doesn’t violate anything, then send a support ticket here: support ticket. You can ask them to explain the reason in detail (using polite, courteous language)
7. Promote the app
Once the app is live, promote it a lot so people know about it, download it and rate it well. Your app carries even more weight when it has many users from countries other than Vietnam
Good luck getting your app onto the Store :D