New revenue sharing model for Microsoft Store apps finally goes live
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The wild west days of striking gold in a curated app store have seemingly long passed as developers are experimenting with more ways to incrementally squeeze profit from their programs and services on platforms they have little control over. Most app store arbiters have, in some fashion, highlighted the reality of the modern-day app developer at conferences, in press releases or emails directly to developers.
When it comes to the Microsoft Store, the company decided it was best to give developers a larger portion of revenue earned from their app in the Store. While great on the face of it, the problem was that Microsoft offered its solution almost a year ago during its BUILD developer conference. Since its announcement, the increased revenue share increase that Microsoft promised had yet to materialize, that is until yesterday, March 5, 2019.
As of 24 hours ago, Microsoft updated its store policies and set into place a revenue share distribution in favor of developers of up to 95% revenue on app sales. The much-needed update to the revenue split for developers is long overdue but developers need to read the fine print before celebrating.
According to the updated App Developer Agreement developers could potentially shave 10% right off the top of their new increase if their app or services isn’t accessed using a deep link to navigate to. Any Microsoft driven traffic becomes ineligible for the full 95% split. Some of the details to the new terms can be found in a screenshot grabbed by @ductionist and highlighted by Windows Central.
Store developers just got a massive raise from the @MicrosoftStore – the new fee structure announced at Build 2018 just went live! pic.twitter.com/YsdyoUDg9D
— Ben Fox (@ductionist) March 5, 2019
Despite the relatively generous revenue split, it remains to be seen how Microsoft can convince developers to create new Windows 10 app experiences, let alone port their old iOS, Android or Mac apps to the Store. There are a couple of plates in the air for Microsoft regarding new operating systems and efforts to push Progressive Web app development that may dovetail with new revenue split news at the company’s developer conference in a couple of months.
