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Microsoft playing AppStore catch-up by wooing iPhone devs?

By: , IntoMobile
Friday, August 14th, 2009 at 12:54 PM

Apple’s AppStore is an industry gold-standard for integrated mobile application distribution systems. It’s actually both a gift and a curse. A curse because all that app-volume has made it painfully obvious that Apple’s application approval process is straining to keep pace – approving questionable apps while denying useful apps with no rhyme or reason. It’s also a gift because Apple’s massive AppStore and its legions of iPhone developers have pushed over 1.5 billion downloads across tens of thousands of apps in the past year. Microsoft has nowhere near the number of developers willing to crunch out apps for its Zune HD platform. In fact, word on the street has Microsoft trying to play catch-up with Apple’s AppStore by wooing iPhone devs to develop applications for Zune HD. In essence, Microsoft is offering cold, hard cash to iPhone devs willing to bring their iPhone apps over to the “Microsoft” side of life.

Daring Fireball has been contacted by an iPhone developer who was allegedly contacted by Microsoft. The iPhone dev was reportedly offered a “bucket of money” in return for porting his iPhone Twitter client to the Zune HD platform. The presumption is that this particular iPhone developer, who declined Microsoft’s offer, wasn’t the only target of Microsoft’s iPhone-to-Zune intiative.

Microsoft just recently posted technical documents that are aimed at helping iPhone developers port their wares to the Windows Mobile space. The docs outline the technical challenges (and solutions) involved in converting mobile applications to work with Microsoft’s mobile operating system. But, this is the first time we’ve heard of any major mobile operating system vendor actually paying a rival platform’s developers to switch sides.

Any iPhone devs out there have any experience with Microsoft offering them cash in exchange for making their iPhone apps more Microsoft-friendly? Drop us a line and let us know.

[Via: DaringFireball]

About The Author

Will Park

Will hails from The City of Angels - Los Angeles, California. He spends his time playing with his numerous gadgets and looking forward to seeing what future holds for mobile technology. An avid promoter of a fully "digital" life, he promotes the widespread adoption of truly mobile, paper-less living. He dreams of the day when he can go completely digital. No more snail mail, paper receipts, bound books, notepads/spiral notebooks, credit cards, hard currency. He's a digital warrior - fighting for the converged life. He is an idealist and a realist - he has a perfect view of what the world should be but knows that the world is not perfect. Can we ever hope to see Will's dream become reality? We'll see...

  • Kevin

    There are thousands more programmers familiar with WinCE/WinMo and .Net than Apple will ever get on the iPhone. Look at the actual number of iPhone developers… what, perhaps 5,000 or less, all pumping out multiple tiny crap apps?

    Everyone tries to seed their new hardware with familiar applications. Apple did the same when they made sure the iPhone had Google Maps, which was on other phones for a long time before Apple used it.

    Apple even set up around a 100 million in seed money, trying to attract developers at first. And gave special help to some of them, even bringing them to Apple HQ.