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How to Cross promote your Windows Phone apps

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Christian HissibiniWhy not list all your Windows Phone applications inside each other, so if someone likes one of your apps they can discover other apps you published?

Windows Phone developer Christian Hissibini (Histech Solutions) shares how he found a way to cross promote his applications, so that his fans could find more of his apps.

Note from Susan: I hope Christian’s story helps you increase downloads of your own applications, don’t forget Canadian developers can earn rewards for their apps through Developer Movement!

This blog post is also available in French/ Cette poste est aussi disponible en francais

Now take it away Christian!

The problem: How to get a list of all my published apps to display in a phone app

We all know that listing all our applications within each other is an effective and free way to promote and publicize them. This way we can help our apps sell themselves.

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Unfortunately the MSDN documentation does give us an official way of doing it. A number of developers have proposed different solutions but they are often cumbersome.

Researching a simpler solution, someone suggested I try the Marketplace Search Task (see the discussion here), but my applications weren’t the only ones returned by the list. It’s not that I’m not a nice person, but I ‘m not sure the other publishers would really want me providing them with free publicity :)

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Next, I tried another more self centered method, but it was less elegant because it affected the user experience. Basically, it went through the browser to a hyperlink with the Web Browser Task.

Recently, while doing research on the URI schemes for launching applications integrated with Windows Phone 8, I discovered the precious, the miracle solution…the URI Zune Scheme!

The Solution: Call the LaunchUriAsync(Uri) with a parameter associated to a URI Zune Scheme

LOL! Who said Zune is dead? Even if it is a ghost, it’s the only way to post from the store, all the applications of a particular publisher where you user the publisher name as the specified parameter.

The syntax of the URI schema in question is as follows:

. zune:search?publisher=[publisher name]

Here’s an example.

Take a button associated with the event ListMyAppBtn. You get the following code:

XAML

 <Button Content="Hint Me" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="68,158,0,0" 

 VerticalAlignment="Top" Height="136" Width="340" Tap="ListMyAppsBtn"/>

C#

 async void ListMyAppsBtn(object sender, System.Windows.Input.GestureEventArgs e)
        {
            await Windows.System.Launcher.LaunchUriAsync(new Uri("zune:search?publisher=HisTech Solutions"));
        }

Note: The parameter publisher name is case sensitive. For example with Histech Solutions as a parameter, it won’t find anything, however with HisTech Solutions the correct results are returned.

Related Downloads

Sample ListMyApps

Download the source code of this example from MSDN

Going further into Zune URI schemas

Here are some other URI Zune Schemas which could be useful for promoting your applications:

Launch the store and post the specified content

zune:search?keyword=[search keyword]&publisher=[publisher name]&contenttype=app

Launch the store and list the applications based on specified keywords

zune:search?keyword=[search keyword]&contenttype=app

Launch the store and display the page to rate the app making the call

zune:reviewapp

Launch the store and display the page to rate the specified app

zune:reviewapp?appid=app[app ID]

Launch the store and list the details of the specified application

zune:navigate?appid=[app ID]

Documentation

You can see the complete list of URI Schemes for launching applications integrated with Windows Phone at the following link:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsphone/develop/jj662937(v=vs.105).aspx

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 02, 2014
    Nice tutorial. Thanks for sharing this