Skip to content

Draft: Add additional metadata for the listing in Microsoft Store (RFC)

Ingo Klöcker requested to merge work/kloecker/microsoft-store-data into master

This MR is meant to be used for discussing how to add additional, mostly Microsoft Store-specific metadata to the AppStream data. The goal is to add all metadata, that is needed for publishing NeoChat (and our other apps) in Microsoft Store (and other app stores) to the AppStream data, in order to streamline automatic submission of our apps to the stores. It makes heavy use of custom values because that's pretty much the only way to add additional metadata that is not directly supported by the AppStream spec. It's unclear whether custom values can be localized with our localization tooling.

  1. The keywords are supported by the AppStream spec, but they do not seem to be widely used in KDE. None of the apps published in Microsoft Store lists any keywords in their AppStream data.
  2. The separate list of features may not be useful because it would only be used for Microsoft Store and it duplicates the list of features in the description. It's probably better to stick to the common practice to add a list of features to the description. There is a feature request for adding a feature list to AppStream: https://github.com/ximion/appstream/issues/388.
  3. The list of Windows-specific screenshots is clearly a hack, but I see no other way to add Windows-specific screenshots in a generic way supported by the AppStream data. There is a feature request for adding support for platform-specific screenshots to AppStream: https://github.com/ximion/appstream/issues/390.
  4. The custom values adding Microsoft Store-specific logos/images are probably the least controversial (apart from the store location of those images).

An alternative approach for adding store-specific metadata to AppStream is described in https://github.com/ximion/appstream/issues/467. A possible interim solution would be using an additional file accompanying the AppStream file. This would come with its own set of problems: localization, considering support by the tooling that creates the JSON files from the AppStream data for apps.kde.org.

@apol @sitter

Merge request reports

Loading