I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t taken aback. We make a decent living from our Store apps, our users seem pretty satisfied with them (and, we presume, the Store experience — they’re using it, after all), and the Store has made massive improvements in the last year in terms of quality and selection.

You wouldn’t know it from the comments we get though. Apparently, we’re developing apps for the worst app store ever.

We used to make Win32 apps, and we know both as users and developers you can’t do everything in a Store app that you can in a traditionally-installed app. But there are lots of apps (like most of ours) that don’t sacrifice much in the way of functionality by constraining themselves to the Store’s sandbox. And with Project Centennial, you can often get the same Win32 apps you used to get, minus the crappy installers with opt-out toolbars.

But that’s just, like, our opinion, man. We wanted to know what Store users actually think of the Store — real, current users, not biased app developers (like us) or users who got burned in 2015 or 2016 and never came back (like the thoughtful pundits shown above, presumably). Do our users use the Store begrudgingly, or cheerfully? Do they care about how they get their software? Are they aware they’re using it at all?

Asking and receiving

We used the ad inventory in our apps to present our users with the opportunity to take a short survey on what they thought of the Store. We offered no incentive for completing the survey.

We collected responses from 508 users from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand from the survey, shown below.

The numerical rating allowed us to compute the Store’s Net Promotor Score® (NPS) as according to our users.

The NPS is a standard metric that calculates the difference between the percentage of Promoters (users who rate 9 or 10) from the percentage of Detractors (users who rate 6 or below).

Scores can range from -1.00 (100% Detractors) to 1.00 (100% Promoters). Anything better that 0 is considered evidence that the product is sustainable and will grow, with 0.30 being “good” and 0.50 being “excellent”, although the best way to consider an NPS is to look at a competitor’s, or your industry’s average.

The results

According to our users, the Microsoft Store’s NPS is 0.05.

The Store has — very slightly — more promoters (9s and 10s) than detractors (6 or less). That’s not bad at all. It means that the Store is poised for growth, nourished by the Promoters singing its praises more than Detractors condemn it.