Flipkart, the Amazon of India, recently released its new universal Windows app, and Microsoft is eager to draw attention to the success. On Friday Jan. 29, the two companies will co-host a Twitter chat for developers and others interested in learning about the process of creating the app.
Founded in 2007 by two former Amazon employees, Flipkart has become India’s largest e-commerce retailer. It both sells its own products and provides a marketplace for other sellers, with a reported 70 percent of sales taking place via mobile phones.
Microsoft, for its part, has been working to demystify the process of building universal Windows apps and lure more developers to experiment with them. Dropbox, Uber and Netflix have all recently released universal Windows apps, among other companies.
Last week, the designers involved in the new app talked about the experience with Microsoft-News.com:
When the process started, WUP was a new concept and there were hardly any apps to understand the functionality. In addition to that Flipkart is a very complex app with a huge user base. The stakes were too high to make mistakes. Users were not aware about such apps and so usability test was not very helpful. They were able to use the app but had never seen something like this before so there were no benchmark to compare it with.
Flipkart’s director of mobile engineering, Amar Nagaram, and Harish Vaidyanathan of Microsoft India will participate in Friday’s chat, which will be moderated by Abhishek Baxi of WindowsCentral. It takes place at 1:00 PM IST, which is a rather ungodly 2:30 AM EST or 11:30 PM PST. But U.S. Twitter-users can catch up later by following @baxiabhishek, @_Amar_N and @harishv, and the hashtag #FlipkartonWindows10.