[the_trapper]

I agree with you that right now, Microsoft's implementation of an app store is definitely quite a bit worse than Apple and Google's versions. However, there are people making money there or else people wouldn't continue to put their apps in it.

Personally for me as a developer, I think one of the biggest benefits to app stores is payment handling and updates.

The latter in particular is such a pain to get right traditionally on Windows in particular. You can either ping your server and nag the user to download an installer at startup or run a background process that periodically checks and installs updates silently. Neither is ideal.

As a user I also prefer the Windows store to the status quo because I can cleanly uninstall store apps. Traditional uninstallers almost always leave vomit all over my computer that doesn't completely wash away until I inevitably reinstall Windows.