Enhanced developer tools on the Microsoft Store

[TWF Bot]

The Microsoft Store on Windows continues to evolve, shaped by ongoing feedback from developers building and scaling apps on the platform. Over the past months, that feedback has guided several updates across onboarding, publishing, distribution and analytics. We recently shared several updates to the consumer experience, and streamlined the developer onboarding experience for individual developers – reducing the time and effort to create a new developer account in half. We are humbled by the positive feedback received from the developer community so far on the new experience. We are not done yet. We’re listening, iterating and investing alongside the developer community. In this post, we’ll walk through new features and updates across developer analytics, web installer and new developer tools.

Actionable developer analytics​

Developers need fast, reliable ways to understand how their apps are performing, without jumping across multiple reports or guessing where to look. Let’s dive into the major improvements in Health, Summary & Usage reports in Partner Center.

The enhanced Health Report provides deeper visibility into app stability, including multi‑filter support across app versions, device architectures and OS builds. These filters help developers analyze stability patterns across different dimensions and track changes over time.

To help developers stay informed about unexpected changes in app health data, Microsoft Store is introducing Anomaly Alerts. These alerts detect unusual patterns in crash or hang rates and notify developers via email and the dashboard when notable deviations are observed. By surfacing these changes earlier, developers can easily investigate potential reliability issues using Health Reports.

We have also introduced a new Summary Dashboard that brings together core indicators, such as installs, ratings, stability and engagement, into a single consolidated view. This allows developers to quickly review key performance indicators, while still providing paths to deeper reports in Partner Center.

Alongside this, the redesigned Usage Dashboard expands beyond basic metrics to include details such as active devices, session counts and engagement duration, with filters for region and app versions. These insights provide additional context on user engagement trends, complementing the Summary Dashboard and other analytics available in Partner Center.

Better install experiences from your website​

Delivering apps efficiently is an important part of the end‑to‑end app lifecycle. Recent enhancements to the Microsoft Store Web Installer are focused on improving flexibility and compatibility across more deployment scenarios:

• Auto-Open for Win32 Apps: With the new auto‑open capability, Win32 apps can automatically launch after installation is completed, thus removing the need for users to manually open the app once installation finishes.
• Expanded Enterprise Device Support: The Store web installer has an improved install logic, thus enabling more enterprise‑managed devices to complete installs.

Developers can switch to the Store Web Installer by generating updated badge code at apps.microsoft.com/badge and configuring the launch mode to Direct.

The refreshed Microsoft Store Badge creator makes it easier to generate official Store badges for websites. Using the official badge helps reinforce trust, supports more consistent distribution and contributes to improved engagement on your landing pages. For developers, this means fewer drop‑offs and a more confident install experience for users.

Introducing the Microsoft Store command-line interface​

A new command-line interface for the Microsoft Store brings app discovery, installation and update management directly to your terminal. This enables developers and users with a new way to discover and install Store apps, without needing the GUI. The Store CLI is available only on devices where Microsoft Store is enabled. Key capabilities include:

• Browse apps with store browse-apps: Search and filter the Store catalog by category, subcategory, listing type (top-free, top-paid, new releases), market, language and more.
• Install apps instantly with store install <product-id>: Deploy apps directly from the command line with a single command.
• Update specific apps with store update <product-id>: Install the latest version of any app without navigating through menus.

Learn more by typing store --help on the command line.

Closing the loop with developer feedback​

Developer feedback continues to play a central role in shaping these improvements. In addition to ongoing community input, we’ve introduced a new, simplified way to share feedback in Partner Center, through short, in‑context prompts embedded directly within key workflows, such as after submitting an app for certification, submitting updates or visiting analytics pages at certain intervals. As always, we’ll continue to share updates as we ship new improvements. Visit the What's New section regularly to stay up to date on the latest improvements.

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