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Microsoft's Windows Store goes global with 33 more countries

In a continued push to include apps from more countries in the Windows 8 store, the tech giant has reached out to developers across the world.

Dara Kerr Former senior reporter
Dara Kerr was a senior reporter for CNET covering the on-demand economy and tech culture. She grew up in Colorado, went to school in New York City and can never remember how to pronounce gif.
Dara Kerr
2 min read
Microsoft's Windows Store Microsoft

Customers in 38 countries around the world can now download Metro-style apps for Windows 8 from Microsoft's Windows Store. The tech company announced today that it is forging ahead with its goal to "deliver a global service" with its app store.

"We want to support developers regardless of where they are, and give customers apps that match their interests, including local offerings," Antoine Leblond, Microsoft's vice president of the Windows Web Services team, wrote in a blog post.

The Windows Store, which launched in preview mode in February, offers both free and paid apps, with the paid ones ranging in price from $1.49 to $999.99. Although, only free apps are available right now. Reportedly, developers are able to create trial apps that expire after a certain amount of time. Microsoft will initially take a 30 percent cut of sales, dropping to 20 percent if an app racks up more than $25,000 in sales.

Before today, the store supported app submissions from developers with dedicated app catalogs in France, Germany, India, Japan, and the U.S.; those in other countries could use the "Rest of World" catalog. In the company's next preview release, it will add 33 app submission locales for developers, bringing the total to 38 countries.

"When you're building a service at the scale of Windows, it needs to grow gradually and deliberately," Leblond wrote. "Running the Windows Update service with hundreds of millions of client connections has taught us a lot about building, scaling, and securing such a service."

Even though still in the Windows 8 pre-release time frame, Microsoft says there have been millions of app downloads "by people in more than 200 markets."

Other changes the tech company is making to the Windows Store is it is expanding the number of market-specific app catalogs from five to 26 and adding seven new languages to the pre-release developer portal.

This story was updated at 11:56 a.m. PT Friday to clarify that the Windows Store is expanding to new markets for customers in its next pre-release phase and not necessarily accepting new submissions from developers; and to add that only free apps are available right now.