The Battle for Mobile App Dominance: Can Microsoft’s Store Compete with the Giants?

Microsoft has strong ambitions in the tech world. In addition to recently announcing the launch of Copilot, its new AI for Microsoft 365, and Power Platform, an AI-based tool that will allow developers to create new applications, the company also wants to have its own app store.

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In an interview with the Financial Times, current Microsoft Gaming CEO and head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, said that, thanks to the European Union’s Digital Markets Act, the company could finally create its own mobile app store. The Digital Market Act, or DMA, will come into force in March next year and will allow any company to create its own app stores in the Android and Apple ecosystems, thus ending the duopoly of the App Store and Play Store.

In the Financial Times interview, Spencer stated the following: “We want to be able to deliver Xbox and content, both our own and third-party content, on any screen that someone wants to play on. Today, we can’t do that on mobile devices, but we want to be heading towards a world that we believe is coming, where those devices will be open.”

Microsoft’s intentions to open a mobile app store come as no surprise. Last October, we learned from an investigation into the purchase of Activision Blizzard that the Redmond-based company has long had a plan to develop a mobile store under the Xbox brand to compete with the Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store.

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Precisely, this last ecosystem would have been one of the biggest headaches for Microsoft and its cloud gaming service: Xbox Cloud Gaming. Apple requires users to download the games offered by Microsoft through its cloud (something that eliminates precisely the advantage of the service), so the Redmond company began to recommend playing through the Safari browser following a series of steps (a rather tedious process for those who do not want to complicate their lives).