We are thankful and humbled by the response and feedback from the developer community since we announced the new Microsoft Store on Windows last year and our Open App Store principles in February. Today, we would like to celebrate the developers that joined us on this journey and share new discoverability opportunities on Windows, the launch of Microsoft Store Ads to help developers reach the right customers at the right time, and new tools for Win32 and PWA developers.
Over the past year, Microsoft Store welcomed thousands of great apps like ACDSee Gemstone, Adobe Express, Audacity, Canva, Course Hero, Discord, Drawboard PDF, Epic Games, Firefox, Luminar Neo & Luminar AI, Mailchimp, Meitu XiuXiu, Microsoft Teams, OpenOffice, Paramount+, PuTTY, WinZip, and Zoom. In the first quarter of 2022 alone, we saw more than a 50% increase in new desktop apps and games coming to Microsoft Store compared to the same period last year.
We have also been partnering with Amazon to give Android developers an easy path to bring their Appstore apps to Windows 11. Amazon has already brought thousands of apps and games to Microsoft Store on Windows 11 and will continue to grow the catalog monthly. The Amazon Appstore preview is currently available in the U.S., and it will expand to five additional countries, including France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom, by the end of this year. Learn more here.
Today, we are announcing further steps we are taking to help developers reach and retain new customers through the Microsoft Store:
We are also excited to introduce Microsoft Store Ads, a new product designed to help developers grow their business by getting their apps or games in front of the right customers at the right time and to inspire Microsoft Store customers with great, engaging content. A developer of a music-making app, for example, will be able to create an ad campaign to get their app in front of an audience that likes music or likes to make music.
In the coming months, developers will be able to create ad campaigns in the Microsoft Store using Microsoft Advertising. Only developers with published content on the Store will be able to run ad campaigns, which ensures ads are contextual for customers.
We will soon kick off a pilot program to test and gather feedback; developers interested in participating can sign up on the waitlist. We look forward to sharing more details in the future.
Last year, we announced a waitlist program for Win32 apps in Microsoft Store and welcomed hundreds of developers. Today, we’re pleased to share that the program is now open to all Win32 developers (.NET, C++, Electron, Flutter, Qt, Rust, and more).
We are also introducing new features designed in response to feedback from the program:
Over the past years, PWABuilder.com has been the best resource and tool to learn, get started, build, and package quality PWAs and distribute apps to Microsoft Store or other marketplaces.
In partnership with the developer community, we are releasing new capabilities:
We want to thank the developer community for the feedback we have received in the past year and look forward to continuing our partnership to make Microsoft Store on Windows better for all developers and customers.
To learn more about these and other updates, check out the Build 2022 schedule.