Two machines rejected me this week. Neither read a single line of my code.
Microsoft bounced my app: blurry icon, wrong link. Then LinkedIn killed my post about it, because it decided a filename, "SECURITY-md", was a suspicious link. I fixed it, reuploaded, and it flagged the same thing one line lower. Third upload: shadowbanned to 0 views since Friday.
So let me say it here, where the algorithm has hopefully cooled off.
Microsoft's two blockers, neither was code
- My "privacy policy" link pointed at a SECURITY policy.
- The tile icon was blurry.
Both are dead now. A real, readable Privacy Policy in the repo and on my site, and a full branding set with every logo size the Store asks for.
Here is the part I did not plan. Fixing that needed a fresh build anyway, and rebuilding a release just to repackage the old code would have been stupid. So in the 5 days since 1.8.0, I folded in 13+ fixes from me and my testers:
- A crash that blanked the entire Features page
- Hardware detection that died on the newest Windows 11 (Microsoft quietly dropped the tool I relied on)
- Services Manager rebuilt into one clean "confirm your changes" flow
- The readability fixes people kept asking for
It all shipped as 1.8.0 Patched. Same release, finally finished. New build, new package, accurate data, fewer scars.
This week
- Stable full-screen mode everywhere.
- Fan Dashboard, and stability: the unglamorous work that decides whether the next tester stays.
Now I wait on Microsoft. Again. The package is in, the icon is sharp, the link finally points where it should.