apps
Petition to enable non-approved countries access to the Windows Marketplace
One of the main problems users have with Windows Phone 7 is that if you have own the device but live in a country that hasn’t been approved by Microsoft – you won’t have access to the Marketplace. And you ask, “What is the point of a smartphone if I can’t download any apps? Why are the phones even sold in countries that aren’t on the approved list?” Exactly. If you’re one of the WP7 users who have asked yourself a question along those lines, this petition aims to solve that. It basically asks Microsoft to enable access to the Marketplace from unapproved countries. At the moment, in order to access the Marketplace from a country not on the list, you would have to provide a false address to trick the system into thinking you’re from an approved country – which could lead to problems in the future. You can read the full petition after the break, or head here to sign it. There’s no guarantee a petition would prove successful, but at least it’ll alert Microsoft of the demand for Marketplace access in every part of the world.
To: Microsoft Corp.
Dear Microsoft,
Windows Phone 7 devices are now available in many countries around the world and we love them. Yet the Windows Phone App Marketplace is only available in 17 countries. Customers in other countries are stuck with smartphones with no access to any 3rd party apps unless they cheat and change their country/region in numerous places. And even then most of them can’t buy paid apps with their perfectly valid credit cards based on the country they were issued.
There are no reasons given why there’s no access to the marketplace in these other countries even though the phones are officially on sale by local mobile operators. One can only guess what those reasons are. The only remotely logical explanation is that you want to localize the marketplace into local languages and currencies for these regions before allowing access. This probably makes some sense in larger markets like Russia or China where the phones aren’t available yet (probably because OS is not localized into their languages). However the phones are available for purchase via official channels in many countries around the world (probably all countries in European Union) even though there’s no localized user interface for these countries. Customers who make informed decision to buy a phone with English UI wouldn’t mind that Marketplace is in English too. What they do mind is that their new shiny smartphone has less features than a regular phone.
We are not talking about Music & Video where we understand that not everything is in your hands. We are talking about your own app marketplace.
Not only this affects consumers, but developers loose a substantial amount of sales simply because they can only sell to customers in 17 countries for no apparent reason.
We would like to ask you to allow access to the international marketplace worldwide or, at the very least, for customers in all the countries were the phones are available, as soon as possible. In case there are objective reasons why this is not possible we would kindly ask you to inform the general public of the issues involved and a roadmap for the worldwide availability of the marketplace.
A phone with no access to 3rd party applications could hardly be called a smartphone. And, even though we love Windows Phone 7, we can hardly recommend it to our local peers at this point.
Apple is well known to be a company that continues to push the envelope when it comes to technological advancements and firsts. This time around, Cupertino has introduced the first ever automated security update for Mac computers in order to assist them in preventing attacks from recently identified bugs, which are also the very same bugs that that security researchers have pinpointed and warned against, as those could be the gateway for hackers to actually gain remote control of machines.
Over in New Jersey, District Judge William Martini has come up with a ruling that the police are not required to actually pick up a warrant before opening a fake Instagram account. This is because the bogus account could actually be used to receive pictures shared by a suspect, and some folks wonder whether this would require a search warrant to be issued beforehand. Not so, according to Judge Martini in his ruling that stated whenever Instagram users post photos on the site, they happen to be practicing “consensual sharing.”
In other words, users who put up photos on Instagram are more or less in the know that should they “follow” or “friend” others, they will also end up sharing their pictures with them. All in all, one should always be extra careful with whatever one shares with others online, as you can never quite tell how something might end up to bit you in the rear some day down the road.
Both iOS and Android number close to a million apps each on their respective app stores, which is one of the reasons why smartphone users flock to either operating system. Of course there are other factors, such as hardware, pricing, availability and so on, but it is safe to say that app availability plays a big role as well. Well Blackberry seems to think so as well as they have revealed that the Blackberry World app store currently sits at about 120,000 apps, which while still pretty small compared to iOS and Android, is a pretty huge deal considering that the platform and its accompanying devices were only launched earlier this year! Blackberry’s CEO Thorsten Heins praised the thriving ecosystem, which we guess was boosted by Blackberry’s efforts where they held events to encourage developers to submit as many apps as they can, and even offering monetary rewards on top of earnings for every app successfully submitted to Blackberry World. We can see that Blackberry is going for quantity at the moment, and we suppose there are quality apps within those 120,000, but for now it looks like as far as apps are concerned, they may very well be edging Windows Phone out of the picture!