When I got to my Profile box today, the message at the top was that I could clean up my profile by moving the applications that I had at the bottom of the page to an “extended section”.
My guess is that this will affect applications in a number of ways:
1. Any application in that section will be forgotten. That means that any exciting updates that might otherwise convince users to use it again won’t work, since they can’t see them. Apps need to get it right the first time, or they are done( at least for that user ). The first batch of applications moved there will have inflated numbers, since their actual users will be less than their installed users by even more.
2. Applications will either be uninstalled right away or won’t be uninstalled for a long time. Once they are moved to that extended section, why bother going through the effort of uninstalling them, since they “aren’t there any more”.
3. Applications will have to have strong profile presences to be kept.
We will see how this works out.
