Windows Store and the lack of apps

I was thinking about why there's such a lack of good decent Windows apps on the Windows Store and got into a pretty heated argument with some people on another forum and one of the people I was arguing with brought up a very good point. How many platform changes has Microsoft pulled on their developers in the last four years? Two. Windows phone developers and by extension Windows tablet developers, have been asked to migrate from WP7 Silverlight, to Windows Phone 8.x modern/Store apps, and now to "Universal App" in just the last four years. This is why developers are fed up, and no longer supporting the platform. And rightfully so. Microsoft essentially pulled the rug out from under their third-party developers not once but twice and now the app developers are sitting back and saying “Why should I develop for this thing? Why should I write one line of code for this platform? Can we trust you, Microsoft, to not pull the rug out from under us again?” Microsoft is going to have a very hard battle ahead of them to convince app developers to create apps for the tablet user interface. Both Apple and Android didn’t do anything that stupid. They didn’t pull the rug out from under their developers, developers know that both the iOS and Android APIs won’t change that drastically whereas Microsoft has done that twice! Sure, iOS and Android may add new APIs but the old APIs will still be there if you want to continue using them; they may just be deprecated. I honestly can’t think of one reason to develop an app (if I were to do so) for Windows tablet right now unless I can be assured that Microsoft won’t change everything on me again in two years. Yes, Apple has come out with a new programming language called Swift but Swift can live alongside of Objective C (the old language used to write iOS apps) in the same iOS app and have both parts be fully functional. But no, Microsoft had to go and fuck their developers over not once but twice! So now you know why Microsoft is stuck between a rock and a hard place right now. -- Tom Tom's Tech Blog