What's so odd about all this is that lack of transparency why things fail was (is?) a huge issue in the Apple App Store process, and MS has had years to learn about what went wrong with the Apple process, and design around those issues. They seem to have baked those faults in to their own process.
"We're backed up with submissions".
WTF? They've been doing roadshows and having dev evangelists push the heck out of "develop apps for the app store!" messaging. That's fine. Staff up appropriately. For a company who understands this is a pivot, they need momentum, good press, etc., plus have had years watching Apple's mistakes in this area - there's just no excuse for not staffing (or ramping up quickly) on the app store processing.
>MS has had years to learn about what went wrong with the Apple process, and design around those issues.
All that time spent learning about what and why Apple does what they do might have brought them to the conclusion that they ought to be doing the same thing.
Or maybe they're "backed up" while they take it all in, figure out what's crap and what's not crap, create a good initial sorting of non-crap -> crap, and then open the flood gates a little more.
You have to imagine that they've just suddenly become inundated by thousands (10s of thousands? More?) submissions and the majority of them will be awful crapware that needs to be sifted through. It takes a lot of time I'm sure -- I don't care how many people you put on staff.
"All that time spent learning about what and why Apple does what they do might have brought them to the conclusion that they ought to be doing the same thing."
I fear that conclusion.
But, really... concluding that courting developers pissed off with an arbitrary opaque process by giving them the same arbitrary opaque process makes sense to ... who?
"You have to imagine that they've just suddenly become inundated by thousands (10s of thousands? More?) submissions and the majority of them will be awful crapware that needs to be sifted through. "
But... they've had more than a year to prepare for it, they need people to want to write for this platform (ios/android still have a the lion's mindshare), and MS is one of the few companies that could afford (financially) to make this experience better than it has. Stop the dividend payouts for a few quarters and use that money to beef up what they seem to be saying is the new direction of the company.
I'm just speculating like everyone else. It's difficult to extrapolate from a single person's nightmarish experience what the experience will be like for an unknown but large number of developers. I hope that gets sorted out quickly. From some other comments it sounds like they still have some bugs in their process.
Unless Microsoft is purposely being opaque with details of why something has failed for the purpose of thwarting malicious or wayward developers, then they should take this as a hint that they need to provide developers with more information so they can track down issues and fix them.
Did you ever try to submit to the Apple app store? All the stories I see about rejections come from sometimes strange reasonings but it's actually always transparent why they rejected an App. I had the same experience with my one app, there was one objection because of some new in-app purchase policy but it was well described in the rejection report and I knew exactly what to do. It seems like the MS store fails at an even earlier reason: Not telling you what actually went wrong.
"We're backed up with submissions".
WTF? They've been doing roadshows and having dev evangelists push the heck out of "develop apps for the app store!" messaging. That's fine. Staff up appropriately. For a company who understands this is a pivot, they need momentum, good press, etc., plus have had years watching Apple's mistakes in this area - there's just no excuse for not staffing (or ramping up quickly) on the app store processing.