Back in the Windows Phone days, they'd send you a phone for developing an app. I wrote a crappy calculator app during a CS class and got a free phone out of it.

I spent more time doing the app submission than I did writing the app. They didn't care what it was. Similarly Blackberry had a similar program a little while later where I just ported the same app and got a Playbook tablet.

It was fun as a poor college kid, but look where it got both of them.

I remember this period. I remember a few dozen devs I knew just submitted dumb/garbage apps and grabbed the bounty.

Don't think it helped the Windows Phone ecosystem at all because instead of a few decent apps, you now had to wade through hundreds of terrible apps and sometimes you'd get lucky and find a decent one.

> because instead of a few decent apps, you now had to wade through hundreds of terrible apps and sometimes you'd get lucky and find a decent one

Sounds like a perfect copy of Google Play.

Counterpoint: I got a free Amazon Echo (gen 1 echo, echo dot, echo show) for free by writing a few voice apps. Amazon has so ce cleaned up the lowest effort ones I made.

I could feel the submission process get tighter as time passed. I think the idea was to see what apps people come up with and what gains traction? Kind of like the story where the management lets people on the grass and paves a walkway on the most walked path?

It was the same on ios in the early days. My first app was a sound board. People paid money for it.

Customers paid money for it, Apple wasn't instructing people on how to build a soundboard and handing them a check or an iPhone for submitting it. Quite the opposite, all of those developers paid Apple $100 to join the developer program.

At a developer conference around that time they showed us step-by-step how to build several simple apps and then encouraged us to make our own variations of those apps to submit to the Windows Store. I remember thinking it was doomed to look as sad as the Blackberry app store.

Seriously. I knew of a few people in college who got that entire $2000 and paid off a few months of rent through that promotion by submitting quick one-off apps like calculators and snake games, and they did it with the encouragement of Microsoft reps on campus.

I was given a pretty decent free Windows phone after a hackathon by a Microsoft rep with basically no strings attached other than a verbal promise that if I ever finished the game I was working on during the Hackathon, I would put it on Windows store alongside any other platform.

They really wanted those numbers to go up.