Windows Phone Marketplace expanded to 23 more countries

Earlier I talked about how the Nokia Microsoft alliance spiked up developers interest in developing apps for Windows Phone. Since apps play a major role in todays mobile industry, getting developers interested in the platform is the key in growing the platform. Microsoft today at the MWC 2012 announced that the Marketplace is been expanded to 23 more countries. Besides this the new low end devices from Nokia, ZTE and probably other manufacturers would in turn mean more sales and more exposure for the developers apps.

Some time back Microsoft had expanded the marketplace to Argentina, Indonesia, Malaysia, Peru and the Philippines. Besides these the new 23 countries are Bahrain, Bulgaria, China, Costa Rica, Croatia, Estonia, Iceland, Iraq, Israel, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Qatar, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Thailand, Turkey, UAE, Ukraine, Venezuela and Vietnam. That makes 28 new markets for developers to sell their apps in this year alone.

Although the app hub is not available for every country mentioned, developers can however build and publish apps to the marketplace through Microsoft's Global Publisher Program. Over the previous months Microsoft has regularly expanded the marketplace into new markets and have taken steps to improve the app hub making it easier for the publishers to submit apps. Microsoft has ensure that this does not come at the cost of the apps quality. All these efforts seems to have paid off as there is a 300% increase in the number of apps been submitted daily.

To make sure that your app runs on low end devices which have only 256 mb of ram and 800 mhz of processor check out this technical preview of the SDK update. This will help you figure out how well your apps are optimized and if they are able to run on the new low end devices. According to Microsoft's test only 5% of the current apps do not work on these devices. Microsoft says they are taking step in contacting the developers and informing them on how to update the apps and make it compatible with low end devices. The SDK preview is just a preview, you won't be able to publish the apps created by it. A final version of the SDK will be released next month. Read more at the source link given below.

Source: WindowsTeamBlog