The weather provider increased the fees

Apr 2, 2015 04:15 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft is still trying to attract more developers into creating apps for its Windows Phone ecosystem, but not many are interested in a platform that has less than 5% market share worldwide.

The fact that Windows Phone gets apps and games only after Android and iOS is not a coincidence, but rather developers’ attempt to establish a steady revenue before taking the chance with Windows Phone.

The issue of not enough users for Windows Phone is reiterated once again by Weather Flow's developer Gergely Orosz who recently pulled his application from Windows Phone Store due to lack of revenue.

Weather Flow was one of the best Windows Phone apps for weather, but that doesn't mean it had a lot of users. Apparently, the weather provider for this application has increased fees to the point that Weather Flow was losing money big time.

After reporting on the removal of the application from Windows Phone Store, the folks over at WindowsCentral have received an official statement from Weather Flow's creator, which explains why it was forced to pull its app.

The application was at a significant loss

“My weather provider - Weather Underground - hiked their prices to a level where the app started making a significant loss that I couldn't fund after a while. Their weather data is expensive - $1,500 / month and the app was bringing in significantly less revenue than this, the last month it was $500, with the purchases also starting to go down.

“After a while the difference got too much to keep paying out of pocket without much hope of breaking even (not making a loss) again. Unfortunately weather data is expensive with lots of hits per day (Weather Flow was making almost 1M requests/day due to live tile updates) and I can't see a cheap or free, but decent alternative data source.”

So there you have it folks, Windows Phone does not seem to be among the preferred mobile platforms that developers would want to create apps and games for.

Maybe in the future things will change, but as of right now Windows Phone apps and games don't seem to bring too much of a revenue to developers in comparison with Android and iOS versions.