Updating your Windows Store App

This blog was originally posted here: Updating your Windows Store app

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You can boost the revenue, market share, and customer satisfaction of your Windows Store app by continuing to improve it based on data about the first version that you release. By analyzing download rates, ratings, and other metrics such as customer reviews, you can pinpoint which improvements will help your app the most, update and resubmit it, and then track the results.

In this topic, you can discover nine ways to improve your app by accessing and analyzing data from the dashboard for your app in the Store and by gathering input from other places on the Internet. After you listen to customers, fix problems, and add one or more "must-have" features, you can resubmit your app to the Store.

To Access your Windows Store Dashboard

1. In the Windows Store app Developer Center, choose the Dashboard tab, and then sign in to your Microsoft account.

2. Under Apps in the Store, find the app for which you want to show data.

Nine Ways to Improve your App

You don’t start to make money or get significant customer feedback until you get your app out to customers. If your motto is “ship it, then fix it,” you can improve your app in at least nine ways by analyzing data after you’ve shipped a version.

1. Check your ratings and number of downloads daily.

   By rating your app, customers influence whether other potential customers download and try it. You should check your ratings daily, especially after each release when you have a greater chance to find and fix issues that affect customer satisfaction. On the App summary page of the dashboard, look at the Ratings chart to determine the average number of stars that customers gave your app in the past 30 days. Next, look at the Downloads graph to determine the number of downloads for the same period of time. If the number of downloads is high but the average rating is low, you should look for specific issues that cause problems for customers. If the average rating is high and the number of downloads is low, you should look for ways to expose your app to more people. For more information about ratings and download data, see Making customer-focused decisions with Adoption reports.

2. Find and analyze customer feedback.

   If the average rating is low, you should find out what customers said about your app when they rated it. On the App summary page, choose the Ratings tab, and then look under Reviews to read what customers wrote over the last 30 days. These comments will likely identify specific issues that you can analyze and possibly fix. Customers can rate your app without writing a comment, so you typically have more ratings than comments. For more information about customer reviews in the Store, see Making customer-focused decisions with Adoption reports.

   In addition, you can look for customer reviews and feedback in places other than the Store. Search for your app by using Bing, Google, Yahoo!, and other popular search engines to find out what customers are saying. Consider creating a Facebook page for your app, and then ask customers and the community to post comments and suggestions. Consider creating a Twitter #hashtag for your app, and then search for tweets that contain your hashtag. If you have a Facebook page or other community engagement site, link to it from inside your app. For example, add the message “Report a bug, suggest a feature, and get the latest updates on my Facebook page” to the About screen, at the end of a level of play, and so forth.

3. Identify and fix the app crashes.

   Nobody appreciates it when your app stops working. Look at the failure rates and the most frequent specific crashes that the Store posts on your app’s Dashboard. On the App summary page, choose the Quality tab, and then look at the following metrics from customers who've agreed to send usage data:

   • JavaScript exception rate. This chart displays the average rate at which JavaScript exceptions occur per computer per day, and the table lists the most common exceptions.

   • Crash rate. This chart displays the average crash rate per computer per day, and the table lists the most common places where a crash occurred.

   • App unresponsive rate. This chart displays the average rate at which an app stops responding per computer per day, and the table lists the most common modules where this event happened.

   If you included public symbol files in your app package and then uploaded the .appxupload file, analyze the process dumps and stack traces that the Store collects from customers. In the list of the most common failures on the Quality report page, identify the failure that you want to analyze, and then choose the Download link. After you download the .cab file, use WinDbg.exe to open the file, and review the stack traces. For more information, see Improving apps with Quality reports. You can also use the debugging features in Visual Studio to more thoroughly test and analyze your app and find code deficiencies. For more information, see Debugging and testing Windows Store apps.

4. Don’t break anything else while you’re fixing code.

   When you add, delete, or otherwise change code, interdependencies increase the chance that you'll break code elsewhere in your project. By using the visualization and modeling tools in Visual Studio, you can examine how your changes will affect the code and help you assess the work and risks that accompany those changes. For example, you can see the organization, dependencies, and patterns in your code by generating dependency graphs. You can describe the system's intended architecture and keep the code consistent with its design by creating layer diagrams and validating code against them. You can understand method behavior by generating sequence diagrams. You can explore class structures by creating class diagrams. For more information, see Visualizing and Understanding Code

5. Update your photos, artwork, and graphics.

   We can’t emphasize enough the importance of compelling art, particularly in your Store cover art and tile art. Even without customer feedback, you should review the artwork and graphics in your app to make sure that they're as compelling as possible. By changing the subject matter, graphic, or even coloring, you can make the image more appealing to the customer and, therefore, the customer is more likely to download and try your app. Be sure that the artwork displays well in all Store locations, both large and small. For more information, see Designing UX for apps.

6. Make the app faster.

   Identify any performance-related issues that customers mention or that you find in your own testing. Improve timing, memory, resource contention, and database interaction by using the tools in Visual Studio for analyzing and profiling code. For more information, see Improving Quality with Visual Studio Diagnostic Tools.

7. Add features or functionality.

   If customers ask for new features or functionality in your app, estimate the time and effort that you'd need make those upgrades and then determine whether they're worth including. If you want more suggestions for features or functionality, explore the trends for other apps in the Store. On the My apps page, choose Explore store trends, and then view the download trends for both free and paid apps. By looking at this report, you learn how many apps customers from different geographic and demographic groups are buying apps or downloading them for free, and you can analyze those downloads by the app's category, subcategory, and customer demographic. For more information, see How to look for your next opportunity in the Windows Store

8. Give the app away and display ads instead.

   If your business model is based on selling your app directly to users through the Store, consider other revenue streams such as receiving money for displaying ads. You might be able to make more revenue by making your app a free download and then displaying ads in strategic places in your app. As an alternative, you could offer a free version that contains ads but from which customers can pay to upgrade to a version that doesn't contain ads. For more information, see Deciding how you offer your app to customers and Making money with your apps.

9. Add a language.

   If you have written your app for a single language (for example, English) consider adding a language to reach more customers. For information about how to localize your app, see Deciding where to offer your app, Globalizing your app (Windows Store apps using JavaScript and HTML) , Globalizing your app (Windows Store apps using C#/VB/C++ and XAML) , and Localizing the package manifest (Windows Store apps).

Submitting your Updated App

After you have made all the fixes, improvements, and other updates to your app, you’re ready to upload the new version to the Store. You release an updated app to the Store by following steps that are very similar to those that you took to release the first version of your app.

1. Create a new app package for the Store, and increment the version number.

   When you created the app package for your first version, you gave the app a four-part version number. Each time you create an app package, the last field in the number gets incremented automatically, but you can decide which of the other three fields to manually increment and by how much. Typically, you update at least the minor version number for each update. For more information, see Creating an app package (Windows Store apps).

To increment the version number

1. On the menu bar in Visual Studio, choose Store, Create app packages.

   The Create App Packages wizard appears.

2. On the Create your packages page, choose the Yes button, and then sign in to your Microsoft account.

3. On the Select an app name page, choose the name of your app.

4. On the Select and Configure packages page, update one or more of the first three fields of the version number.

5. If cleared, select the Include public symbol files, if any, to enable crash analysis for the app check box.

6. (Optional) Update any other properties on the page

7. Choose the Create button.

8. On the Package Created Completion page, choose the Launch Windows App Certification Kit button, and then fix any errors that the certification tests report.

Submit the app to the Store.

To submit your updated app to the Store

1. On the menu bar in Visual Studio, choose Store, Upload app packages, and then sign in to your Microsoft account.

2. On the Release page of the Windows Dev Center, choose the Packages button.

3. On the Packages page, upload the packages that you created by using the Create App Packages wizard.

   Be sure to include the .appxupload file, which is required to collect process dumps and stack traces.

4. On the Description page, enter your text in the Description of update box.

   Describe the new capabilities or other changes to the app that you included in this release. This information doesn't appear to customers by default, but it'll appear if a customer chooses to display more information about what will change if they download the update. Be clear and complete when you describe these changes because, if your description doesn't match your app's upgrade, your app could fail certification.

5. (Optional) Update or fill in any other properties on the page.

6. Choose Save, and then, when you're ready, choose the Submit for certification button.

Turn on telemetry collection.

You must turn on the collection of telemetry data in your Windows Store Profile if you want information about how your app is running on a customer's computer. For those customers who allow us to collect this data, your app automatically reports how often the app is launched, how long it’s been running, and whether it’s experienced an error such as crashing or encountering a JavaScript exception.

To enable telemetry data

1. On the My apps page of the Windows Dev Center, choose the Profile tab.

2. On the Profile page, choose the Telemetry data collection link.

   For more information, see More about collecting telemetry data from your apps.