At day one of its Build 2018 conference, Microsoft made a number of announcements of interest to developers. The most notable may have been that the company is increasing the revenue share it pays on app sales and in-app purchases through the Windows Store. Developers will get 95 percent of revenues that come from direct or deep links, and 85 percent of revenues when Microsoft provides the sales lead. That’s a sharp contrast to the 70 percent share developers get from Apple’s App Store or the Google Play Store.
CEO Satya Nadella also announced that the company wants to turn its Azure cloud computing service into “the world’s computer.” He added that the company will open source its Azure IoT runtime and add more AI capabilities to the cloud computing service.
In addition, Microsoft intends to update Visual Studio with improvements for Universal Windows Platform development, C++ development, Xamarin and .NET mobile development, debugger support and live unit testing.
