Microsoft bans apps with Metro name

Microsoft recently renamed the User Interface (UI) in all of its documentation to ‘Modern UI’ from ‘Metro UI’, officially. Documentation now reveals that apps that have the word ‘Metro’ in the name will not pass through certification, and will not show up on the Windows Marketplace, according to UnleashThePhone.

A line in the section reads, “Don’t use names trademarked by others… Make sure your app name doesn’t include the word metro. Apps with a name that includes the word metro will fail certification and won’t be listed in the Windows Store”. This could be problematic for many apps such as MetroTwit and Metrogram.

  In the documentation for Windows 8, the name ‘Metro’ has been replaced with the name ‘Modern’. One example of this change is this description of a Windows 8 Developer Camp event, “Windows 8 is Windows re-imagined. Join this session to learn about the new platform for building Modern UI-style applications. You’ll get a deeper understanding of the platform design tenets, the programming language choices, and integration points with the operating system and across Modern UI-style apps. We’ll also demo the Windows Store and the many different ways to monetize your application, including subscriptions, trial apps, advertisement, and in-app purchases”.

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Apps are not allowed to use ‘Metro’ in the name

Microsoft also seems to have simply done a find-and-replace action in the documentation to replace the name Metro with Modern UI. This has resulted in weird and confusing statements such as, “Building a Windows 8 Modern user interface-style user interface”.

Microsoft has claimed that ‘Metro’ was just a code name for the user interface used by developers, and that generic use of the code name by the public was never intended. However, as per a report by ZDNet, this switch has been made owing to a naming dispute with its European partner, Metro Group. The fact that Microsoft went with a name as boring as Modern UI supports the idea that it might have been caught off guard by the naming dispute.

Formerly known as Metro, the Windows 8 user interface was specifically designed for use with mobile phones, tablets and touchscreens. The PC-port of the operating system will also have the UI, which would enable apps designed specifically for the UI to work across platforms.

If you have installed the Windows 8 Release Preview on your system, it’s quite possible that you do not like the tiled interface on non-touch PCs and laptops. We have a short tutorial on how to get rid of the Windows 8 (Metro) UI. You will need Windows 8 Metro UI Switcher, a portable utility, which can be downloaded from SuperUtils.com. A couple of manual tweaks are also explained in the tutorial.