It’s time for Microsoft to kill the Microsoft Store — or else fix it

Which of these four things is different from the others: the iOS App Store, Android’s Google Play, the Chrome browser’s Chrome Web Store and the Microsoft Store built into Windows 10?

If you answered the Microsoft Store, you’re right. While the other three download stores host many thousands of useful apps of every type and description, and have a thriving, engaged audience, the Microsoft Store offers very few truly useful downloads and has an indifferent base of users who rarely bother to spend the time to rate and review the software the store hosts.

The problem isn’t that there’s not a lot of great Windows software to download. There’s plenty of it — just not on the Microsoft Store. In November 2018, Mike Fortin, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Windows, said in a blog post that there are “over 35 million application titles with greater than 175 million application versions” available for Windows 10. Having reviewed Windows software for many years, and at one point been in charge of one of the web’s largest Windows download sites, I have no reason to doubt him.

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