Microsoft To Support Higher Priced Apps For WP7

“I’d rather developers sell fewer than a million downloads and get to a million dollars,” Brandon Watson, director of an apps developer program for Microsoft, said in a press briefing in Helsinki. “If we can support a higher price point that’s good for developers.” Microsoft seems to be supporting that way of thinking as they believe that by allowing higher priced apps into the store it would encourage developers to create higher quality applications.

The question is considering that this is just a mobile device, how much would you be willing to pay for a high quality app? The difference between the Android Market and Apple’s App Store is that the Android Market is open sourced meaning they will allow just about anyone to upload an app which could turn out to be an incredible app or just malware. Apple has faced quite a bit of criticisms from developers on how long and how difficult it is to get their apps approved to be placed in the App Store.

I brought those comparisons up because while Apple’s App Store has good quality apps that only cost $0.99 or $1.99 or even free, that are great and of excellent quality. Games like Doodle Jump, Fruit Ninja and let’s not forget Angry Birds only cost a dollar or so but look at how well crafted they are, and how they gone on and sold millions of copies. Considering that WP7 has a pretty tiny piece of the smartphone pie shouldn’t they be trying to lure more users in rather than talking about raising app prices?