[cawhitworth]

I'm not sure why this is Microsoft's fault as opposed to the developer's. Exactly the same kind of techniques have been used for years on desktop applications/games.

(and, y'know, you could pay for stuff that you like using, feed a developer's starving family and continue to get updates and improvements rather than ripping them off)

[olsn]

before the win8 store was there, the developer was able to choose how to store assets ect. you can for example precompile every assets into a binary archive, if that is changed the app won't start the point now is that microsoft is more or less forcing the developer to use their way of packaging applications and their way of packaging an application is not secure! This is not limited to the issue of removing ads, if someone can modify any files of an application without consequences, then a virus will be able to do the same: just write a virus that adds some malicious code into one or more apps and the next time the user uses the app, any data the app has permission to access could be send to an evil server