No Chrome in the Store? This is (Still) Microsoft’s Fault (Premium)

I'm fascinated to see that 2017 is ending on a controversy that I first pin-pointed much earlier in the year. Also, a controversy for which I have already found a solution.

As you must know, Google confounded everyone last week when it quietly issued only its second-ever Microsoft Store app, called Google Chrome Installer.

When Mehedi first pinged Brad and I about this app, I didn't even realize that Google was its maker: The idea was ludicrous to me, and I didn't understand why Windows-focused bloggers were even writing about this topic. But Google being the author did of course elevate this story to newsworthiness. But the question quickly changed to why.

Why would Google release such an obvious piece of shit?

In case this isn't obvious, there are various technical barriers preventing Google from releasing its web browser, called Chrome, in the Microsoft Store. In fact, it wasn't truly obvious that Google would even want to release Chrome in the Store. Before last week's episode, we only had the musings of a single low-level Google engineer to go on. (He claimed the company was interested in doing so.)

Anyway, Google Chrome Installer is not Chrome. All it is, is a small and very basic Store app that triggers the install of Chrome from the web. It's the type of nonsense that a beginner programmer might write, not something one would expect from Google, the leading personal technology platform maker.

But release it they did. And then, just hours later, the "app" was summarily pulled from the Microsoft Store.

For its part, Microsoft claimed that Google Chrome Installer violated its Store publishing policies: The Microsoft Store ecosystem is based around a mobile apps platform that is safe, reliable, and not detrimental to the performance of users' PCs, at install time or over time. It is, in other words, the polar opposite of Windows' Win32/desktop environment, which Microsoft is keen to deprecate and then block over time.

Google Chrome, of course, is a Win32/desktop application. So are all popular Windows apps. This is the Catch-22 of Microsoft's strategy.

The violation, such as it is, is that Google Chrome Installer was using the Store (which is reliable) to install a desktop application (which is not). This is explicitly not allowed. So Microsoft pulled the app.

Why did Microsoft approve the app in the first place, you probably wonder? My guess is that a AAA publisher like Google gets slipstreamed through the app approval process, and that this app's initial approval was automated. Later, when actual humans at Microsoft stepped through the day's approvals and saw Google in their, they probably gave it more scrutiny. And discovered that it violated the Store's policies. (Just an educated guess; it makes sense.)

There are great arguments to be made that all the major app store makers---Microsoft, Apple, andGoogle---do a lousy job at this kind of thing. In the same week, in a stunning coincidence, Apple actu...