One possible reason why your program crashes when submitted to the Microsoft Store, but it runs fine on your machine

A customer reported quite some time ago that when they submit their program to the Store, it always fails with a crash. But it runs fine on their machine! What could be the reason?

The customer shared the program, and one thing I noticed is that the program’s manifest declared the minimum supported version as 10.0.0.0, even though the program uses the SDK from build 16299. If you say that your program runs all the way down to Windows 10 version 10.0.0.0, then the Store validation will try to run it on the lowest version of Windows 10 it can find, which would be the RTM version, 10.0.10240.0.

And the program indeed crashes on build 10240, because the program uses some Windows features that were introduced in build 16299, and it failed to perform the required version check before trying to call into those features.

(In this particular case, the program used a Navigation­View control on its main page, which explains why it crashed at launch.)

So check your minimum system requirements when you submit your program to the Store. If you say that you support a version of Windows 10 from 2015, then the Store is going to hold you to it.

Related: The case of the UWP application that crashes at launch on Windows 10X.