Publishing on the Microsoft Store
I paid for a full year of a business address before confirming whether I needed one to publish my app. It turned out I didn’t. The code wasn’t the difficult part of this particular problem.
Since this spring, I’ve been distributing my Windows app, YuHex, through the Microsoft Store.
Seeing software I wrote appear in a store is a satisfying thing. I’ve been programming for a long time, but that still feels good. Getting there, however, involved more than writing code.
This is the story of the address.
Why does publishing an app involve an address? Before I started, I hadn’t expected that question either.
Free registration, with something to worry about
Microsoft Store registration for individual developers used to cost $19. By the time I registered, it was already free. Free registration for individuals had become broadly available in September 2025.
That seemed considerate.
For comparison, as of October 2026, Google Play developer registration was $25, while Apple’s developer program for App Store distribution was $99 a year. With Apple, you don’t pay once and finish. You pay every year.
At an illustrative exchange rate of ¥158.45 to the dollar, $19 comes to about ¥3,010, $25 to ¥3,961, and $99 to ¥15,687. Those are simple currency conversions, not the amounts anyone would necessarily be billed. Still, viewed in yen, they’re substantial sums.
The weak yen makes itself felt.
When you develop software on your own, both the time and the money come out of your own pocket. Before you even know whether anyone will use what you’re making, it helps to have no initial registration fee. Right, then. Time to register and publish the app.
That was when I came across something that bothered me: developer contact details.
Email address. Postal address. Phone number. Information required for registration isn’t necessarily information displayed to users. But when you’re looking at an unfamiliar screen, the distinction isn’t immediately clear. I wondered how much would become public, including my real name.
People using an app should have a way to contact its author. I understand that. I wasn’t planning to publish something and then ignore everyone.
Publishing my home address was another matter.
I wanted people around the world to use my software. I didn’t particularly want to tell the whole world where I lived. Surely there was some way to keep those two things separate.
So I signed up for a business address: an address I could use for work correspondence instead of my home. I paid for a full year.
I’d been pleased about the free registration, and now money was going out somewhere else. Well, if that was what publishing required, so be it. I carried on.
I couldn’t contact support about contacting support
Even so, I wanted to confirm exactly what an individual developer had to disclose. I didn’t want to configure everything based on an assumption and run into trouble later.
I tried contacting Microsoft support.
The form returned an error.
If there’s a bug in my app, I can examine the source code. I can look for the suspicious part, change it, and try again. But I can’t fix somebody else’s support form.
I wanted to send an inquiry. The inquiry wouldn’t go through. Who do you contact about that?
An awkward situation.
Eventually, I managed to submit it by using Microsoft Edge and switching the developer dashboard to English. That worked in my environment. I never isolated why the Japanese interface had failed.
I didn’t have the whole explanation, but at least my message could now get through. Finally, I could ask the question I’d been trying to ask.
I corresponded with the overseas support team in English. The Japanese team also answered in Japanese. People at Microsoft in Japan and overseas helped me, and I discovered that an individual developer like me could get a proper conversation going.
English used to make me tense before I’d even begun. Explain a technical issue, read the reply, ask a follow-up question—it can be difficult enough in Japanese. Doing it in another language adds another layer.
Even so, it feels much more approachable now than it once did. There’s no need to give up at the outset simply because the person you need to speak to is overseas. I think that’s a wonderful thing.
When I explained what was troubling me, I received specific answers. Somewhere inside a company far away, there was a person I could actually talk to. I appreciated that.
It turned out I didn’t need the address
Through those exchanges, I learned that, for publishing my app as an individual developer, the contact details I’d been worrying about—such as my postal address and phone number—weren’t mandatory public fields. The email address in the relevant support-information field was optional as well.
In other words, I hadn’t needed to pay for a business address solely to publish the app on the store.
Oh. So that was how it worked.
I was relieved. At the same time, I remembered the year’s fee I’d already paid. I should have checked first and signed up afterward. I’d done it in the wrong order.
I still keep the address. The money is already spent, and I can use it as a business contact address. It’s another part of the experience of putting an app on a store for the first time.
Registration was free. I paid for an address anyway. That’s my publishing preparation in one sentence.
But an unnecessary expense wasn’t the only thing I took away from this.
The support staff were quick and courteous. I never felt that my questions were being brushed aside because I was just one person making an app. They explained what I should change and how to think about the things that concerned me.
When you develop alone, you generally investigate problems alone, too. I can keep working away at a programming issue, but I can’t establish a store’s requirements simply by deciding what I think they mean. Having someone who can confirm them is reassuring.
Perhaps someone preparing to publish their first app is hesitating because they’re worried about exposing their address. I’d suggest identifying their registration category and the circumstances of their app, then asking support. There’s no need to follow my sequence of paying for an address first and asking afterward.
This is an account of what I confirmed for my own circumstances. Giving Microsoft information for identity verification is separate from displaying it publicly on a store page. It doesn’t mean that every piece of information, including a developer’s real name, will remain private. Other stores have their own requirements, too. Google Play displays information such as an individual developer’s legal name, and Apple has contact-disclosure requirements that depend on region and trader status.
What mattered to me was learning that, under my circumstances, I could continue distributing the app without publishing my home address. Once that was clear, I could finally settle down and focus on the software.
I’ve liked Microsoft since the days of MS-DOS. We go back a long way, so of course there have been times when something didn’t work and left me stuck. The support-form error was one of them.
But the people who helped me on the other side of that form made me like the company even more. Thank you.
Getting software written and published involves more than screens and settings. Sometimes, it involves people helping you. Now, when I see my app in the store, I remember that as well.
Adapted from my Japanese essay on @IT Engineer Life. Registration fees and disclosure requirements above retain the October 2026 context of that essay; the support outcome describes my own case.
AI tools assisted with the English translation and editing of my original Japanese essay. The experiences described are my own.
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