From a Windows Developer email:

Russia will become a Microsoft remittance country where Microsoft (or its billing service provider) will collect and remit the VAT on behalf of developers. Effective January 1, 2017, Microsoft will determine the VAT due, withhold such VAT from your App Proceeds, and remit directly to the Russia tax authorities. The current VAT rate in Russia is 18%.

You know, when you give an app store (iOS, macOS, Windows) 30% of your take, you actually tend to get a lot.

• Free licensing
• Free update mechanisms
• Free downloads
• A pretty reliable landing page
• Free payment processing
• Limited marketing

That's not bad.

The question's not even, "Is that worth 30% of my revenue?" for many (most?) developers. The question is, "Is 30% too much to give up to release my app before I could have all of this other stuff ready?"

If you could release at Day 0 instead of Day 250, and 70% of the lost sales from 0-250 would make up more than 30% of all sales, then you're an idiot not to release with in an app store as quickly as you can.

What the store buys you is a reduction in time to market. Use that.

What it also buys you is more markets. There's no way I could keep track of VATs and taxes for every country, especially when these countries don't make up much of my user base. Microsoft is big enough that it's worth it to them, as part of the 30% they take from us, to make changes like this VAT charge.

Course it stinks. I'm now getting 70% * 82% = 57.4% of my list price in Russia. Ouch. I could make the price higher to cover the VAT, but for the sales I have there, I probably won't bother.

As Joel says, it's all about barriers to entry. Such a protective tariff should make foreign software more expensive in Russia. I wonder to what extent it does.

Labels: app dev, app store, app store econ, indie, taxes, windows store

I went to build an app package for my newest app -- Podcasters' RSS Feed Generator, which does, not surprisingly, exactly what it says it does -- I got the following error in Visual Studio.

App manifest references the image 'Assets\StoreLogo.png' which does not have a candidate in main app package.

Turns out this is a pretty cryptic error. We get a partial answer from hololens.com:

Best Answer

• xtopher ✭

  August 12 edited August 12 Answer ✓

  I was getting the same error. Renaming the .png in Visual Studio solved it. Unity is adding a .scale-xxx to the name, which VS doesn't like.

... but it's not quite that easy. You can't simply rename the file; the images also have to be exactly the right size. Painfully, all the .scale-xxx extensions to the names that I had weren't from Unity; they were from Visual Studio. Et tu, VS? That stinks. Microsoft is helping me create a situation they don't support.

Anyhow, the three I had complaints about with their "correct" sizes are:

• StoreLogo.png: 50x50 pixels
• BadgeLogo.png: 48x48 pixels
• Square71x71Logo.png: 142x142 pixels (of course, right?)

Blasting all the old ones with StoreLogo, etc, in the name and then dropping the new, "correctly-sized" replacements into the Assets folder, then including them in the project from VS, does the trick.

Or so I thought. Now I get...

Which is it, dang it?

Answer: Apparently we wanted the sizes the error window wanted. Ignore errors like the ones pictured, above.

Labels: images, noteToSelf, visual studio, windows store

I'm close to releasing my second application to the Windows App Store, and have gotten just good enough at dealing with icons -- not a rocket scientist-level task by any stretch -- and thought I'd share.

Buy an icon

First, you need a square png (or other common format) of your icon that's at least 620x620 pixels. You can get a nice rounded image, but for the Windows Store, at least, a full square is better.

In my experience, it's not too difficult to trade a couple weeks of waiting (in case you get a bad contractor) and $5-$15 to get a servicable icon from fiverr.com. I've used folks from Pakistan each time, strangely enough, and gotten very good results three times, most recently with foxsquare. You do need to be respectful to some degree, as their contract says, "We Do NOT Take Order related to Pork, Nudity, Alcohol & Gambling." So far, so good for me.

Here's my latest, a design for a podcast feed creator. I wish the angles on the orange circles were perfectly symmetrical, and that the little "i" icon didn't reach the bottom of the image, but all things considered, this is a heck of a lot better than I could've done in several hours' work. It's a steal at $15 with .psd.

package.appmanifest

To insert the icon into your UWP app, open up your package.appmanifest file from Solution Explorer, and hit the Visual Assets tab.

Now you have a pretty simple interface to upload icon imagery. I recommend clicking on each of the lines from "Square 71x71 Logo" on down.

Resizing your original

For each one, you'll want to upload resized versions of your original icon. "But how do I get those resized images quickly?" you ask? That's easy if you download IrfanView, the handiest image viewer I've ever used.

Can't recall how many years I've used IrfanView now, and I was impressed to learn that it has extensive command line support.

First name the original square.png. Then run a bat file that resizes everything.

Here's the bat file I'm running, though you may have to change to the path where you have IrfanView installed:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\IrfanView\i_view32.exe" .\square.png /resize=(284,284) /aspectratio /resample /convert=.\284.png
"C:\Program Files (x86)\IrfanView\i_view32.exe" .\square.png /resize=(600,600) /aspectratio /resample /convert=.\600.png
"C:\Program Files (x86)\IrfanView\i_view32.exe" .\square.png /resize=(300,300) /aspectratio /resample /convert=.\300.png
"C:\Program Files (x86)\IrfanView\i_view32.exe" .\square.png /resize=(620,620) /aspectratio /resample /convert=.\620.png
"C:\Program Files (x86)\IrfanView\i_view32.exe" .\square.png /resize=(176,176) /aspectratio /resample /convert=.\176.png
"C:\Program Files (x86)\IrfanView\i_view32.exe" .\square.png /resize=(200,200) /aspectratio /resample /convert=.\200.png
"C:\Program Files (x86)\IrfanView\i_view32.exe" .\square.png /resize=(96,96) /aspectratio /resample /convert=.\96.png
"C:\Program Files (x86)\IrfanView\i_view32.exe" .\square.png /resize=(88,88) /aspectratio /resample /convert=.\88.png
"C:\Program Files (x86)\IrfanView\i_view32.exe" .\square.png /resize=(50,50) /aspectratio /resample /convert=.\50.png
"C:\Program Files (x86)\IrfanView\i_view32.exe" .\square.png /resize=(24,24) /aspectratio /resample /convert=.\24.png

pause

Boom. Done.

Now go into the appmanifest UI and click on every largest size available for each asset line, then add your image.

NOTE: Some of these already have placeholder X images in your project. OVERWRITE THEM. You can overwrite in addition to the ones you're uploading to ensure you have decently high quality images.

Rectangle splash and wide logos

This will leave you with just two assets unfilled, both rectangular. One is the "Wide 310x150" and the other the "Splash Screen" logo.

I kinda cop out here. I could probably get fiverr to make me some, but instead I open Ms. Paint.

The size we need is 1240x600. I tell Paint to create a new image, then I hit "resize" (Ctrl-W, strangely enough), and get it to 1240x600.

Make sure "Maintain aspect ratio" isn't checked.

Then I use the paint bucket to fill that all black. Finally, I paste in the 600x600 image IrfanView created and slowly move the middle pixel over until it's at 620 pixels into the image in Paint. Very high tech.

Save it and put into both of the assets you had left.

Voila! The end. Cheap and quick.

Labels: fiverr, howto, images, paint, uwp, windows, windows store