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Microsoft: Just Stop The Crapware Already

imageYou know, Marketplace was going all fine and dandy and then bam – it’s loaded with tons of shit now. I mean, there’s a real estate app for every city with more than 5 people in it and about 1,000 apps that are in German or something in the Marketplace. I know Microsoft doesn’t want this in the Marketplace but wasn’t this inevitable? Back in February Microsoft lifted the limit on free apps from 5 to 100. At the time I wrote “Nothing wrong with increasing the cap but at 100 it’s an invitation to spam with free apps. Not sure I love this concept because the last thing we want is the Android Market.” Well I don’t think we’re there yet but if this continues it’s a bad bad thing.

I can’t find new apps. Since last week in order to find apps I need to scroll through a few pages of feces to get to the legitimate apps first. This hurts devs as it’s a lot harder to find the real apps. And on phones the categories are new, free, etc but not ‘paid’ so you can’t even sort it out that way and there’s no ‘delete crapware’ option obviously. It also hurts all of us as end users because good apps are getting buried.

I’m content that Microsoft isn’t going to follow any specific advice I give them so I won’t even bother with that. They have enough people to think of a solution, but bottom line – fix it before it really is broken. Don’t sit on your thumbs for weeks debating how to deal with this. Implement something and you can refine it over time but don’t let good devs and good apps be the ones to pay the price.

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