The newest feature in the Microsoft Store is more ads.

If your main problem with the Microsoft Store is that you’re getting too many relevant results when you search for apps, you’ve got good news: Microsoft is officially launching Microsoft Store Ads, a way for developers to pay to have their apps in front of you. eyes when you go to the store to look for something else.

Microsoft’s landing page for the feature says that apps will show up during searches and in the Apps and Games tabs in the app. Developers will be able to track whether users see ads and where, and whether they download and open apps after viewing ads.

Microsoft also provided an update on the state of the Microsoft Store, listing 2022 as a “record-breaking year”with over 900 million unique users worldwide and “122% more new app and game developer submissions than last year.”. . “In the past year or two, Microsoft has steadily loosened its restrictions on Store apps, allowing for traditional Win32 apps, as well as relying on the Amazon App Store for Android and the Windows Subsystem for Android to expand its selection.

The company launched a “pilot program”of Microsoft Store ads back in September 2022, and the look of ads doesn’t seem to have changed much since then. Ads will be shown to Microsoft Store users on Windows 10 and Windows 11 and are only available to developers who have already published their apps to the store.

These kinds of ads are usually described in mild terms – that they’re just a way for developers on the Microsoft Store to improve their experience and find more users. The reality is that similar ads on Apple platforms, at least in my experience, tend to be either irrelevant (ads for Twitter or Truth Social when looking for Mastodon customers), annoying (ads for free shovel games) or active. malicious (brief period when gambling advertisements flooded the store) or a combination of all three factors.

The new add-on may or may not display relevant search results for users, but it adds more ads to a platform that already has a lot of them. A fresh installation of Windows 11 from a USB drive automatically downloads a number of third-party apps from the Microsoft Store the first time you connect to the internet, and Windows includes many of Microsoft’s own ads for Edge, Bing, Microsoft Start, Microsoft 365, OneDrive, and other products and features.