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Could They Make It Harder To Find New Windows Phone Apps?

As you know, we try to inform you of any new games/apps that hit the Marketplace that we think have a broad appeal. Obviously, this requires regularly checking the Marketplace to see what’s new and the more I do it, the more I find it frustrating. Simply put, the ‘glance and go’ memo didn’t make it to the team that put together the Marketplace experience, both on the phone and within Zune. Here are the steps needed to view new apps:

On the phone it goes like this:

  1. Open Marketplace
  2. Tap ‘Apps’
  3. Swipe the screen once to leave the featured app page
  4. Select ‘All’
  5. Swipe twice or tap on the tap to ‘new’

In Zune the process is like this

  1. Open Zune
  2. Go to the Windows Phone section (because Marketplace defaults you to music)
  3. Click on any category (since view all isn’t available initially)
  4. Click on View All in the categories
  5. Sort by release date

Of course, when you do it on the phone it takes time to lead each page, even the initial pages with the subcategories. It seems like they propagate those fields each time and it’s not stored locally (to the cloud, with each swipe).

No matter how you look at it, there are at least 2 extra steps to actually viewing new apps and because of that third party websites are a necessity to fill the whole that MS left. Yes, MS has a website to view WP7 apps- it shows 3,000 apps when there are over 4,000 to give you a sense as to how well they maintain it. So I often find myself going to wp7applist, MarketplaceBrowser or AppHab, but WP7AppList is my go to (I find it’s the most up to date and easy to browse).

Anyway, it’s silly that we have to go through this each time we want to try to find new apps. And this is in addition to the list of gripes I’ve already stated about searching for apps in Zune (which has yet to receive an update even though Macs did get an update). So please Microsoft, make it easier on us to give you money. That’s a simple request.

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