Microsoft is paying developers $100,000 or more to develop apps for its Windows Phone platform, reported Bloomberg Businessweek.
That in itself is nothing new. Having come late in the game, for awhile now the software giant has been playing catch-up in the mobile industry, as New York Times' Jenna Wortham and Nick Wingfield noted last year, "Microsoft is so determined to have lots of brand-name apps for its Windows Phone app store that it is willing to pay for them." The incentive, described further down in the article, can include a payment of anywhere from $60,000 to $600,000 "depending on the complexity of the app."
Yes, it's bribery, and, yes, it works. Microsoft's incentives have managed to achieve noteworthy results that benefit developers and consumers alike. Take Foursquare, for instance. Without the financial boost - in this case, paying for an outside company to port Foursquare's app over to the Windows Phone platform - Foursquare would likely not exist on Windows phones, period.
From then, the Seattle-based company store has seen its apps skyrocketing from around 70,000 apps and games to 145,000. And perhaps that number has also been boosted a bit by Microsoft's second promotional program to encourage developer interest: A bounty program that gave developers a $100 Visa gift card for every app they published to the Microsoft Store, up to $2,000 worth of total rewards, between March 9 and June 30 of this year.
And Microsoft, of course, is not along. Blackberry doubled the reward pool to $2 million for those participating in its final "Port-A-Thon" program in January of this year - that's after the company saw more than 15,000 apps submitted over a one-and-a-half-day period in its previous "Port-A-Thon" event. Those building or porting apps were eligible to earn $100 for each, up to a maximum of $2,000, for each app that was accepted into the BlackBerry World app store.
