Microsoft defends Windows Phone 7 app ‘sluggishness’ claims

By Tom Warren, on 11th Nov 10 2:13 pm with 4 Comments

Reports of poor performance and slowness on Windows Phone 7 applications have appeared in several recent reviews of Windows Phone 7.

Engadget noted and demonstrated a number of application issues on Windows Phone 7 in their recent review. Others have complained of similar issues and have suggested that the Silverlight layer running on top of the native code is to blame. Winrumors sat down with Brandon Watson, Director for Windows Phone 7, earlier this week to get his take on the issues. Watson admitted that Microsoft was aware of some issues and has provided guidance to application developers.”There’s things that we know that cause problems” Watson revealed. “As with any platform, managed or native or otherwise, it is easy to write poorly performing apps, anybody can do it,” he said. Watson insisted that Microsoft has been assisting app developers create great performing apps. “We have hit things that we know developers should know about and we’re giving strong guidance.”

Watson admitted that things aren’t perfect but that the company is working on it. “We’ll get better over time, I don’t think it’s a managed vs un-managed discussion I just think it’s a new platform for Silverlight on the phone vs people feeling comfortable if they can say ‘well if I write C++ then I’m down to the metal, it’s going to perform.’ That’s not true, if you write your code poorly then it’s actually going to run poorly.”

Microsoft confirmed on Monday that it now has 13,000 registered Windows Phone 7 developers. Windows Phone 7 users now have access to around 2,000 apps and games in the Marketplace and the software giant is approving new apps each day. The average turnaround for new applications is just one day according to Watson, down from Microsoft’s promised five business days.

  • Anonymous

    I love WP7 but one only needs to look at the official Facebook and Twitter apps for some subpar performance. Those were written with direct help from Microsoft and were shown off at PDC as being apps that other devs should model after!

  • http://www.osnn.net Electronic Punk

    And if it doesn’t he will shave his head.

  • Ola

    I can confirm that some of the controls that is shipped with the SDK is reported slow and people working on the SDK has released several replacement controls that should work better. Haven’t got my phone yet to do any testing but if you keep yourself up to date with for example Jeff Wilcox and David Anson you should know about this.

    http://www.jeff.wilcox.name/

    http://blogs.msdn.com/b/delay/

  • GP007

    Lots of these apps are v1.0 still, really as much as an excuse this sounds or w/e things don’t always work right the first time around. At least I’m sure MS will be quick to fix things, the Xbox Live Extras app had some problems and they fixed that in around a week or so.