Windows Marketplace for Mobile

» see marketplace.windowsmobile.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

there is a microsoft mobile app store i had almost forgotten existed. windows marketplace for mobile ran between october 2009 and may 2012 as the app store for windows mobile 6.x devices. by then i was on a symbian nokia and would soon move to android, windows mobile was already the dying platform in the smartphone os wars. really though, the app store microsoft shipped for it was an attempt to catch up to what apple had launched in july 2008.

the launch was 6 october 2009. 246 apps in the initial catalog. developers took 70% of each sale and buyers had a 24-hour return window. the developer program cost $99 a year. those were the same economics apple was running at the time, microsoft copied the model closely.

the timing was the problem. windows mobile 6.5 had shipped that same year but microsoft had already decided the platform needed a full reboot. windows phone 7 was announced at mobile world congress in february 2010, four months after the marketplace launched. every developer who saw both announcements understood the 6.x store was a dead end. the ecosystem shifted attention to the new platform before the old one's app store had a chance to build a catalog.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

the store's early months were quiet. windows mobile devices in circulation were mostly business handsets from hp and htc. the users of those devices were less inclined toward buying casual games and consumer apps than the iphone crowd that was driving the app store's early growth. the marketplace catalog stayed small.

microsoft tried to seed the store with popular third-party ports. really though, some brand-name developers did list titles but most of the mobile app economy skipped windows mobile entirely and went straight to iphone. by 2011 the catalog had crossed a thousand apps but the number was small compared to the 500,000+ apple had by that point.

~ the day it died ~

9 may 2012 was the shutdown. the closure announcement gave developers a few months of notice and gave buyers a couple more months to re-download any previous purchases before the store went completely dark. windows phone 7 had been out for eighteen months and the newer windows phone store was where every current microsoft-mobile app was being sold.

the closure had a wider consequence. windows mobile 6.x devices in the field lost their only official app source. really though, side-loading was still possible for anyone who knew how to build a cab file, but the mainstream way to install anything new on a wm6.5 handset was gone. this basically stranded any remaining windows mobile hardware from that point onward.

~ what it became ~

the windows phone store that replaced it took the same 70/30 economics forward but ran on a completely different underlying platform. windows phone 7 apps were built on silverlight and xna, neither of which the older 6.x devices could run. the two ecosystems shared a brand family and nothing else.

windows phone itself did not survive long after either. microsoft folded it into the windows 10 mobile branding in 2015, then abandoned the whole mobile os push in 2019. the marketplace lineage from the 2004 marketplace.windows.com through the 2009 marketplace for mobile and on through the 2010 windows phone store all traces to a category microsoft never won.

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