All devs can now publish Microsoft Teams apps to Office Store, not just select ones; features added to preview include 3rd-party notifications in activity feed
Emil Protalinski / VentureBeat :
Context & Ripple Effects
In mid-2017 Microsoft Teams was still gating who could ship into it: publishing to the Office Store was reserved for select developers, which kept Teams' catalog small while it chased Slack-style momentum. Opening the store to all developers converts Teams from a product with integrations into a platform with a marketplace — the same arc that produced the revamped, searchable app Store with slash commands less than a year later.
The timing matters because the catalog was about to be pulled in several directions at once: education-focused app integrations arrived weeks afterward in the School Data Sync and OneNote Class Notebook update, and by late 2020 third-party apps had been pushed all the way into Teams meetings themselves alongside low-code Power Platform tools. The 2017 decision to drop the publish gate is the precondition for each of those layers.
First-order effects
- Any developer can now submit a Teams app to the Office Store without a Microsoft invitation, immediately widening the catalog buyers see when they browse or search for integrations.
- Third-party notifications in the activity feed give outside apps a native re-engagement channel inside Teams, so a developer's app can pull users back without leaving the client.
Second-order effects
- With publishing open, Microsoft's role shifts from gatekeeper to curator — ranking, discovery, and review become the levers, which is exactly what the searchable-by-integration-type store built out in January 2018 operationalizes.
- A denser catalog raises the bar for Microsoft's own first-party Teams features, since bundled capabilities now compete on shelf space with third-party equivalents rather than filling gaps.
Third-order effects
- The steady widening of surfaces — store publishing in 2017, command-box and store search in 2018, meeting-stage apps in 2020 — points toward Teams consolidating workplace software into a single hub where third-party tools live inside the chat client rather than beside it.
- If the pattern holds, marketplace governance (approval speed, notification policies, revenue terms) becomes a competitive weapon against rival collaboration platforms, since whoever opens fastest attracts the developer base first.
The trend: Collaboration platforms are absorbing third-party software by progressively replacing curated pilot programs with open marketplaces, turning chat clients into operating systems for work.