Publishing an application - Build Windows 8 Apps with HTML5 and JavaScript - page 335

Chapter 14

publishing an application

Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.
— Winston Churchill
For many years, the process of publishing a Microsoft Windows application was limited to building

a setup program—possibly with the aid of an ad hoc framework. The setup program, in the end,
looked a lot like a smart script through which you copy files in the target folder, arrange databases,
configure the system, and create a shortcut on the desktop. More importantly, the setup program
could be distributed directly by the author with no sort of intermediation. The author was also re-
sponsible for advertising the application.

Mobile platforms such as iOS and Windows Phone approached the problem of distributing
applications in a different way. The platform owner—Apple for iOS and Microsoft for Windows
Phone—makes itself responsible for distributing applications and for giving applications a bit of
extra visibility by creating a central store. This approach has been taken also for Microsoft Windows 8
native applications that are, in fact, known as Windows Store applications.

In Windows 8, applications that use the native user interface—those applications you practiced
with throughout the topic—can only be distributed through the store. The main reason for this choice
is to ensure that available applications are of good quality, work well on the devices, and are devoid
of security vulnerabilities and bugs. Microsoft ensures an application is good for the store at the end
of a certification process; as you can guess, this comes at a cost. The cost is a 30 percent share of the
price for paid applications. For free applications, there's a limitation on the number you can upload
and a flat rate beyond the threshold.

In this topic, you learned how to build Windows Store applications by taking advantage of the
several new application programming interfaces (APIs) available. Now it's about time you close the
circle and learn what it takes to publish a finished application to the store.