My Techday

Windows 8 presents massive opportunity for Kiwi devs

November 16 - 9am 667

With the release of Windows 8, Microsoft’s major roll of the dice is in the market and it is presenting massive opportunities particularly for those developers who are quick to create apps for the new platform.

That much emerged at a Microsoft-hosted lunch in Wellington, where a selection of successful local application developers met with the press.

While the 7 companies present develop for all platforms, Atta Elayvan, founder of Lazyworm Apps explained it as simply as this: “There may never be another opportunity of this magnitude for developers ever again.”

Strong words, but the reason is simple: with hundreds of thousands of apps on Google’s Play store and Apple’s App store, a developer really has to do something spectacular to stand out from the crowd.

With around 4 000 apps on the Windows Marketplace, the developer has a lot less noise; if their app is really good, they’ve got most of the job done.

Adds Elayvan: “I’ve got friends who do Android and Apple apps; right now they are too busy to develop for Windows 8.

“Meanwhile, the Twitter and YouTube apps we’ve created for Windows 8 [Tweetro and Metrotube] are going through the roof.

“With the release of Windows 8, downloads of these apps went from a few hundred a day to over 8 000 a day.”

As more devices enter the market, those numbers are likely to continue increasing; Elayvan notes, too, that his company specifically chose to develop apps for YouTube and Twitter given the immense popularity of these services.

Whether or not Windows 8, the Surface and the many other devices which are entering the market around the Microsoft ecosystem are successful or even well received isn’t of all that much concern to developers like Elayvan, either.

The reason? Microsoft’s business model and its status as the default operating system for more than 9 out of 10 people.

Consumers will typically get Windows 8 on their next machine, whether they like it (as in like the operating system) or not. Those consumers now come from a world where buying apps for a few dollars is routine.

There are 1.3 billion devices running Windows; while Microsoft says 4 million upgrades to Windows 8 were made in 3 days (and claimed that number was big…when some maths will tell you that it’s a conversion rate of a tiny fraction of a percentage), the fact is that there will likely be hundreds of millions of Windows 8 consumers within a few months (or years).

For Elayvan and the some 1100 other Windows 8 developers in New Zealand, that could just mean bank. In a big way.

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