We’ve made no secret of the fact that we believe we have a great platform for developers.  The canvas we have delivered is enabling amazing creativity to flourish.  Some developers, however, have taken a wait and see approach to developing for Windows Phone.  For those who have taken the plunge, some developers are making more money on Windows Phone 7 than Android, even though we have less handsets in market.

Yes, this is a data point of one, but it’s a public data point about which we can talk.  There are many more stories like this on the horizon, but this is the first one that is verified by a third party.

Fruit Ninja has made 7x more money on Windows Phone 7 than Android.

That is the claim of the article.  Why is this?  There are many potential reasons, and I don’t want to venture into what could quickly devolve into a discussion based on opinions.  What we can say is that the data shows that the Windows Phone Marketplace works for developers.  It shows that customers of Windows Phone are spending money to buy apps.  It shows that that Windows Phone has great potential.

UPDATE (03/09/11 11:20A): The Xylogic data is what it is.  I won’t vouch for it, so short of taking this post down, I can only say that I cannot verify their Android data.  Is it a fair assumption that any overstatement/understatement they make for Windows Phone is same for Android?  Maybe.  I am not going to surface Fruit Ninja numbers as that’s not my place.  Unless Xylogic made a mistake in our favor (overstating $$ on Windows Phone) and against Android (understating $$ on Android), the ratio will hold.

Besides, and here’s the point that everyone seems to be missing – we have sold way fewer phones and Android.  Way.  Even if we were at parity on revenues, which platform is more appealing?  Don’t let the source of the data get in the way of the undeniable fact: the dynamics and structure of the marketplace on Android creates a challenge for developers to make money.  When Angry Birds can’t make money with per unit sales, that’s a sign. [END UPDATE]

We are still learning, and will continue to share what we learn with our developer community about what apps are working, how to market their apps, get noticed, etc.  However, the fact remains that for this developer, Windows Phone 7 has been well worth their time.

The smart money is to bet on the train that is leaving the station, not the one that’s gone.  Again, public data point of one, but this train is picking up steam.  As CNet noted, our mobile fortunes are tied to app developers.  Getting developers info like this is incredibly important to demonstrating that Windows Phone is a viable, credible, profitable platform for developers.  We will turn ourselves inside out to get developers whatever they need to be successful.

Still on the fence?  If you are an Android developer, and looking for a switch, reach out to us.  For developers committed to building on Windows Phone, we will take care of you.  Every developer matters.

Today, we posted a new article up at the Windows Phone Developer Blog about how developers are having great results using the Trial API and Microsoft Mobile Ad control.  The most astonishing piece of data for me what that more than half of the Trial API apps convert to a sale within one day, and most of those within 2 hours of the download.

While the stories of existing devs having great success is music to my ears, what’s really exciting for me is the expansion of the geographies which can support developers.  We have just announced our Global Publishing Program, which allows us to extend the ability to be a published Windows Phone 7 developer to countries where we do not yet have Marketplace.

Publishers will sign up to support an entire region, allowing developers to submit applications to Marketplace through the publisher.  We have launched with our first partner, Yalla Apps, a new publisher supporting the Middle East and Africa region.  So what new countries can we support?  Here’s the list:

Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Bahrain, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Cyprus, Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, French Polynesia, Gabon, Gambia, The, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kenya, Kuwait, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mayotte, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, New Caledonia, Niger, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Palestinian Authority, Qatar, Reunion, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Tunisia, Turkey, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe

Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Israel & Egypt were our top 5 countries in terms of tools downloads from that list, representing multiple tens of thousands of developers.  Now each and every one of them can start publishing their amazing apps and games for Windows Phone.  This also means that the 3 developers in Somalia, 2 in Equatorial Guinea and Swaziland, and the 1 developer in Central African Republic, who have downloaded our tools, well, we now have a solution for you.  In fact, if you are one of the 8 developers in one of those countries, reach out to me – I’d love to hear your story.

More country support is coming.  We are listening to each and every one of you and working like mad to ensure that every developer who wants to build for Windows Phone 7 can.  Every developer matters.

I love Scoble.  I really do.  He’s a great source of content, and occasionally controversy.  In a post today, he suggests that developers should build for Android tablets.  I am left a little confused as to his overall logic train, so let’s poke at a few of his points.

The Bar is Low

Really?  The last time I checked, developers were not the types who wanted to walk into a room barely filled with mediocre people and declare themselves the best.  The lure of trying to unseat Angry Birds is a strong siren song.  Using Robert’s logic, the ones who couldn’t cut it are currently developing for Android tablets, so you should go hang out with them.

Crowds = Death

This is fairly well reasoned notion.  Having to deal with immediate scale is killer.  Robert is pointing to the Twitterati as the arbiters of a developer’s success.  What he doesn’t take into account is that editorial selection from the AppStore tribunal would result in a similar challenge to scale.

Hard Earned Dollars Results in Scrapiness

This is a true statement.  However, the uber point is lost in his analysis.  Android is a more difficult platform on which to monetize.  No amount of scrapiness is going to overcome flawed platform decisions.  You can be pretty scrappy when you are making no money on a platform designed to enable marketplace transactions too, and you have the benefit of knowing that as you succeed, the dollars are a result of your actions, and not failings on the part of the platform provider.

Build Unique Stuff

That’s an interesting statement.  I am sure it’s true to some extent, but most developers are looking for interesting scenarios to that lead to sales, not gee whiz factor.

Define Google’s Marketing

One of the core principles of our team is to make sure we are 100% focused on the success of the developers.  We give them whatever they need to be successful, and engage with them wherever we can to find out what we can be doing better.  Robert is making a suggestion that Google is going to reach out to the dev community for help in this regard.  Unless he has inside knowledge, I haven’t seen this actually occurring in the market.  He does make one very good point – Google hasn’t figured out how it will sell its tablet.  The same can be said for the how they promote developers on their platform.

Access to Lacking Features

See point above about unique stuff.  I am confused.  Using widgets + getting on Oprah means your app is more polished than Flipboard?  That’s a damn polished app.  I am not sure widgets would make it more so.  Notifications certainly enable an entirely new way to interact with customers – we’ve got them on Windows Phone 7 and devs are making some cool uses of them.

“Smooth” is Harder

I get that if you figure out how to optimize on the platform, and figure out all kinds of neat tricks, you will be a better programmer.  Totally agree.  You know what else makes you a great programmer?  Getting to focus on your algorithms and overall experience, and not dealing with ridiculous, time consuming, soul sapping optimizations which shouldn’t have to be discovered in the first place.  Developers universally tell us that they love working with the Windows Phone Developer Tools because of the maturity of the tools, the smoothness of the UI, and the ability to focus on the experience, and not nonsense.  You shouldn’t need an additional toolkit for dealing with fragmentation.

Get Noticed

I don’t buy this.  I am not likely to pay more attention because someone has something I don’t.  It may work for the first 2 people to come up to me with a Xoom, but after that, it won’t.  At SxSW, this will not be the case.  Too many plugged in people.  Getting noticed is about having something of value, or being able to cut through the clutter.  Having a Xoom is not a marketing strategy.  Being awesome is.

Fandroids

The fans matter.  Absolutely.  Do they have influence?  That’s the question.  There’s quite a lot of fans of the WebOS as well.  Getting more people to yell into the Techcrunch/Scoble echo chamber is not a marketing strategy.  It’s simply not.  Robert highlights the very difficult part of being a mobile app developer: getting noticed.  The fan boys are fine for an initial early adopter push, but to really get noticed, there’s a much larger problem to be solved.  What is the “backrub algorithm” equivalent for apps?  That’s a post for another time, but the company that figures that out is going to be unbelievably wealthy.

Iterate Faster

Being able to publish faster into a broken marketplace is not a suitable replacement for a broken marketplace experience.  There’s a reason Robert pointed out that people are having a hard time monetizing on Android.

At the end of the day, developers want sockets.  Android tablets will lag iPad for some time in that regard.  As they will also lag iPhone/iPod Touch and Android handsets.  Android hasn’t clearly demonstrated you can make money on their platform when they are supposedly activating 300,000 handsets a day, what makes Robert think that targeting a smaller target market (Android tablets) is a more viable alternative when the underlying marketplace flaws around monetization remain?  That’s not to say developers aren’t making money on Android.  It’s just not as easy as other alternatives in the market.

Stop the presses!  I’ve got some news.  The great team at GDGT is coming to Seattle, and they are having a bit of a party and meetup.  There should be a great deal of nerdosity going on there, which is awesome in its own right.  This will be further accentuated by the fact that the Windows Phone 7 team will be there to show off some devices.

Under normal circumstances, that would be pretty cool.  However, we’re not in the “pretty cool” business here.  I think I have made it clear, we are in the epic shit business.  Apparently, the nerdosity is expected to flow especially high at this event, and the request was made for the developer platform team for Windows Phone 7 to make an appearance.  Challenge thrown down.  Challenge accepted.  Challenge contorted into something all together different.

Since announcing the email alias to which you can send your device requests (about 2 weeks ago), we’ve been blown away by the response.  We’re still making our way through those requests, getting them into a CRM system and assigning them to our field evangelists.  That’s a tale of logistical complexity for another day.  However, the whole point of having preview devices is to get them into the hands of developers, right?  So we have two things to share.

First, if you are a developer in the area, and want to come to the event, bring your laptops with your Windows Phone 7 XAPs.  We will have phones on site to which you can deploy your code.  You can see it running on a real Windows Phone 7.  You get to share it with the crowd.  That’s not bad, but certainly not epic.  No, no.  Epic is in reserve for those true hackers who show up with the goods.  For those who have got the best XAPs, we are bringing a couple of phones with us, and some developer agreements to sign.  That’s right…the “A” gamers will be walking out with phones on which to continue their coding.

Are you game?  Spread the word, and see you there.

In the last couple of days since Andy’s announcement that all employees would get free Windows Phone 7s, we’ve seen a lot of buzz about the offer, including some around why we were doing it.

So why did we do it?  Put simply, we did it for the employees.  If you speak to any software developer or hacker, they will tell you that they love writing code.  They love solving problems.  They love creating things.  They love sharing their work with their friends and peers.  They love the satisfaction of seeing something work on a screen.  Unfortunately, when you work for a company, most of them generally have pretty stringent rules about moonlighting, and the ownership of IP.  For software companies, this usually includes code and side projects.  Microsoft is no different.

With this new mobile app era upon us, the Windows Phone team felt it important that we enable our own employees to participate.  There are so many talented, technical people at Microsoft.  It’s not just professional software developers…many Microsofties love coding, and they work on projects in their spare time.

We believe most Microsofties want to write apps for Windows Phone 7.  Before last week, and the changes announced in our policies, they couldn’t.  They would not have been able to profit from those projects.  We made these changes specifically to address the desire of our own employees to express themselves in code in the app marketplace.  A funny thing happens when you remove friction and barriers among a group of creative people.  I can’t wait to see what they create.

The internal response has been overwhelming.  I can’t count the number of languages in which we heard “thank you” while at our global sales summit last week.

The first previews of Windows Phone 7 are starting to hit, and they all feel fair and balanced, which is always appreciated. Engadget certainly goes in depth on their preview, as does PC Mag.  However, it was this unboxing video which made me smile the most, if for no other reason than it was the box I designed with the help of a fellow Liverpool Football supporter.  He’s really the brains behind the operation.  My contribution can be seen at around 2:30 of the video.  OK, off to our global sales summit to spend some quality time with our field sales team members, and spread the word on Windows Phone 7.

There was a story which surfaced yesterday about vulnerabilities exposed in a wide swath of Android apps.  SMobile Systems conducted research in the Android app space and found that some 20% of the apps allow third-party apps to gain access to sensitive or private information.

It would be easy to dismiss this article by pointing out that by simply downloading an app, a customer is making a explicit allowance to an app to access data on the phone.  What I found troubling about the findings wasn’t necessarily the point about access to the data, but rather that, 5% of the apps surveyed could make calls and 2% could send premium SMS messages.  Talk about a surprise cell phone bill.

The key word in the above statements, however, is “could.’”  Yes, customers make the decision to download those apps, but they have no way of knowing with certainty what those apps are doing behind the scenes.  UPDATE: Ben points out below that the customer us warned of all the APIs used, which is true, but they aren’t told *how* they are used.

Further, because of the multi-tasking architecture of Android, the apps have the potential to be doing a bunch of bad things in the background when the phone is not in use.

Google has been quick to point out that the architecture of Android would limit what actual damage one of these apps could do, but that’s really not the point.  What is being lost in this discussion is that there is no curation of the Android marketplace.  For all the grumbling and grousing about the Apple AppStore, their review process would likely catch these abuses.  There is no such level of certification for the Android marketplace.  Customers don’t want to think about needing anti-spyware software for their phone, as the article implies is one solution for Android.

The Windows Phone Marketplace certainly believes in the curation model, and we have placed user security as a top priority.  This is one of the main reasons that we have our app certification process, and why (UDPATE: “at least in version 1”) apps are run in sandboxes, with no access to any data other than its own isolated storage, or the ability to communicate with other apps.  UPDATE: The goal is to ensure that absolute best customer experience when using their phone.

UDPATE 6/25/10

I’m not one who believes in conspiracy theories or anything, but I do find the timing of this announcement from Google that they can remotely wipe apps from phones a bit curious.  I have to go do some digging, but I’d be interested to know if the Android developer agreement has specificity about what would constitute grounds for a remote wipe.

Inspired by the always entertaining Mike Klucher, I snapped this pic of my own avatar on my daily use Windows Phone 7.  He talks about the very way I felt when my avatar showed up on my phone this week.  It made me smile.  I even went into the XBox Marketplace to change around some clothing options to see how long before it appeared on my phone.  I was not disappointed.

I also felt great sadness because my achievements were so dated.  Not that the system wasn’t working.  No,no.  This was a stark reminder that I haven’t been playing nearly as much XBox as I should be!!  So, off to GameStop I went and picked up my copy of Red Dead Redemption.  I very much plan to use the “hey, it’s Father’s Day” excuse all weekend long.

Well, there’s an old adage that you should be careful what you ask for because you might just get it.  The avalanche of emails and phone calls looking for developer devices was a welcome development.  There are some out there who think that we might as well pack it in on this whole mobile thing.  Developers, however, know better.  New markets == new opportunities for big ideas to break through.

I personally have seen, erm, a surge in the amount of email I get on a daily basis, thanks in no small part to Long Zheng.  I love that there are so many developers with so many great ideas wanting to get phones, and I particularly love all the electrons being harmed to fill my inbox.  My email is the one that’s out there [brwatson (at) microsoft], but there’s a whole team of evangelists who will be getting the phones to developers.  I’m just acting as a switch, and have been fortunate enough to be something of a public face.  We’re still working on the specific plan details for devices going out next month, but we wanted to lay out some principles for how we are going to actually get phones in developers’ hands, as well as what we are hearing from developers.

First, we are going to prioritize for apps being built by large and small teams, which represent some pretty big ideas, specifically targeting the launch timeframe.  At Mix10 we showed a pretty long list of partners, and we have continued to add to that over the last few months.  Second, as some of you may have heard, we are getting phones to our existing published Windows Phone Marketplace ISVs.  There’s several thousand apps and companies who are part of the 6.x marketplace, and we want to help jump start their transition to Windows Phone 7.  Finally, we are prioritizing for those committed developers who are building apps for Windows Phone 7 and sharing their knowledge about Silverlight, XNA and Windows Phone 7.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been an interesting handful of weeks.  I’ve been spending a lot of time in the field with our country managers as we get ready for the coming launch of Windows Phone 7.  That’s a post for another day.

I’m here at TechEd, and there’s a lot of talk about Windows Phone 7 devices and when they are going to be made available.  One cool thing that the team is doing is handing out coupons to event attendees redeemable for general availability devices when they start shipping.  We’re only handing out around 50 or so of these coupons, so it’s definitely not a broad distribution.  It’s meant for people who are attending sessions or wearing Windows Phone hats around the show floor.

Developer devices are also on everyone’s lips.  During the Windows Phone session yesterday, Terry Myerson (he runs engineering for Windows Phone 7) stated that we will start putting phones into select developers’ hands next month.  That’s exciting stuff.  Obviously we’re starting with the developers who have invested in the Silverlight and .NET platforms, registered at Windows Phone Marketplace and have begun building apps with the Windows Phones Developer Tools.  Specifics of the programs are TBD, but we are going to want to get phones into large ISV hands, small team hands…you name it.  We’re definitely not going to carpet bomb phones; we want to get maximum leverage for our phone distribution to developers.

Stay tuned, and go download the developer tools.  If you need inspiration about what amazing apps you can build, check out this post from Anand about the Imagine Cup winners.  And if you want to show some gumption and reach out to me directly, have at it.