I’m pleased to announce the immediate availability of the refreshed Windows Phone Store badge. The badge provides official branding assets to help you market your Windows Phone app, and help your customers find it.
The refreshed badge comes at an exciting time for Windows Phone: over the past month we’ve been moving to the new Windows Phone Store infrastructure; last week we added 13 new developer markets (bringing the supported developer country count to 191 countries!); BUILD is less than two weeks away; and the Windows Phone 8 release is coming up fast. And on the other side of campus, the Windows Store recently opened to developers and released the new Windows Store badge.
So what’s new?
Based on your feedback, we’ve refreshed the badge to not only be more flexible for your app marketing efforts, but to also better embody Windows Phone design principles:
One Look: The first thing you’ll notice about the Windows Phone Store badge is its visual alignment with the Windows Store. Not only do the two stores share an icon, but the images have a similar look and feel, much as the platforms do.
Two Colors: The new badge is available in two colors to provide increased flexibility in your app marketing content: a standard black and white image, and one in a classic Windows Phone blue accent color.
Three Resolutions: We also are making the badge available in three sizes (125 x 40; 208 x 67; and 376 x 120) to give you the greatest flexibility in your print and online app marketing. Additionally, you can also resize the logo as needed, provided that the final image is at least 40 pixels high (0.56 inches or 14.11 mm).
Global Applicability: What you won’t see with the new Windows Phone Store badge is a multitude of localized Download Now images, for all the different markets where Windows Phone apps are available. Instead, the new badge has the clean and simple shopping bag icon customers see in the Windows Phone Store and the Windows Store to indicate that your app is ready to purchase and download.
Using the download badge for your app
You can use the Windows Phone Store badge wherever you market your app, whether in print or online. Full usage guidelines are available on the Download Center along with the badges, but I want to highlight four general principles:
- The badge can only be used to promote an app that is published and currently available for download from the Windows Phone Store
- When you use the badge alongside badges for other app stores, the Windows Phone Store badge should be of equal or greater size than the other store badges/logos
- The blue accent is our preferred color of the two badge designs, but you are free to use either
- When used online, the badge image should link to your app on the Windows Phone Store, and the link should use the WindowsPhone.com Redirection Service
It’s worth digging in a bit on how to take full advantage of the Microsoft Redirection Service when you link to your app. Although MSDN has full documentation on properly formatting the deep link with your App GUID, some Windows Phone developers aren’t familiar with how to use it. When you link to your Windows Phone app, you want to use the following convention:
http://windowsphone.com/s?appId={App GUID}
When you use this link format, the Redirection Service does a pretty nifty job of smartly routing customers to your app by doing two things for you. First, it routes customers to the proper Windows Phone Store region and language based on their machine and account settings. This way your app appears to them in a way that makes sense to them. And second, it presents the app to the customer in a way that is most actionable for their browsing experience.
Here are a couple of examples of how to use the deep link format, links that route to a couple of apps that are close to my heart:
- Find My Champ: http://windowsphone.com/s?appId=30db0bac-e968-4e50-8205-30adf19fb5b9
- WPDev Feedback: http://windowsphone.com/s?appId=b5466109-2b8d-46f4-9461-c959e433ae4a
You’ll notice that when you click either of these links, the WindowsPhone.com Redirection Service simply does the right thing for you as a customer and gets you to the right place. If you’re browsing this page right now from your phone, clicking either of the links delivers you directly to the Store’s phone experience, where you can click the Install button and jam on enriching your wpdev experience. If either of these apps were for sale, clicking the link would similarly land you on the page where you can immediately ‘buy’ or ‘try’ the app. Alternatively, if you are browsing this page from a device other than a Windows Phone, these links take you to the Windows Phone Store webpage that is relevant for you and your location, presenting the app’s appropriate regional listing and in your language (if the developer provides a localized listing). Gone are the days when all the links would route you over to the en-US listing. Now you go right where you want to be.
More assets to come
Soon we’ll be releasing additional assets online to help you better market your apps. These include a vector-based image of the download badge, a layered chassis image to help you build better mock-ups of your app experience on Windows Phone, and additional marketing guidance to help you effectively use these assets to market your app online and in print.