developers

Microsoft Improving Windows Phone Marketplace App Quality

April 30, 2012 | By Pradeep

Today, Microsoft announced their ongoing efforts to improve the Windows Phone Marketplace app quality. It will be most welcomed by both consumers and developers. Microsoft listed some important points such as avoiding trademark or copyright violations.

On bulk publishing of low quality apps which we keep on complaining, Microsoft says the following,

First, we’re seeing developers submit the same app to multiple Marketplace categories, a violation of our policies. Instead, you should pick a single category that best reflects the content and function of your app. This not only helps customers find your app but gives all developers an equal opportunity to have their app discovered where people expect. Developers who submit the same app across multiple categories will have it removed from the catalog.

Second, when you create multiple closely-related apps—say, a series of quote apps that vary by theme—the Marketplace tile images must reflect the unique features of each individual app. They cannot be duplicates or near duplicates of each other. Your branding also shouldn’t dominate the tile

Another issue in marketplace is that some developers have been entering more than the five allowed keywords for an app which makes their apps listed at inappropriate places when an end user conducts a search in marketplace. Starting this week, Microsoft is going to start enforcing the five keyword rule for all current and future Marketplace apps. Any app that exceeds this number will have all its keywords deleted.

And finally on the content which are “racy” or sexual in nature. Microsoft will now tackle that by a more stringent interpretation and enforcement of their existing content policy.

Source: Windows Team Blog

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Developers: Tired of iOS-style web apps? Microsoft releases Metro-theme for jQuery Mobile

April 30, 2012 | By Liwen Guo

Many mobile-optimized websites have iOS-like designs – and there’s a good reason for that: Most mobile UI frameworks were initially targeted at the iPhone, and its visual style does work pretty well, for the most part. But Windows Phone looks very differently and, arguably, cleaner and fresher, so such web apps usually don’t quite fit in with the Metro look. To remedy this situation, Microsoft has recently released a Metro-style theme for jQuery Mobile, which makes Metro easily available for web developers.

We checked out the demo page (also pictured above), which shows off some of the features of the theme. For the most part, it looks and works pretty well, although there are a few issues: animations (predictably) aren’t quite as slick and smooth as you’d expect from native apps, and the supposedly fixed header doesn’t keep its position at the top while scrolling, but does jump back after the scrolling is finished (though this appears to be a general issue with jQuery Mobile). An app bar is also implemented, which actually animates nicely, but doesn’t make much sense since the browser itself also displays an app bar.

Still, the Metro-theme is a welcome addition for Windows Phone users, and since the code is open source, there’s nothing stopping other developers from forking and improving it (interestingly, the theme appears to be sponsored by Microsoft Open Technologies, a subsidiary focusing on open source work that was only founded two weeks ago).

For developers interested in implementing the theme in their own web app, check out the post on MSDN for more details and download it on GitHub.

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Microsoft Advertising celebrates another Windows Phone Marketplace success story

April 27, 2012 | By Surur

We recently heard about the Taptitude developers making $1400 per day using Microsoft’s Advertising solution for Windows Phone.

Microsoft Advertising have now highlighted another developer who is doing very well on Marketplace.

Geekworks, the developer of Shuriken Ninja, has also found great success on Windows Phone, earning $245,000 in a year from their ad-supported game.

Mat Newport and Matt Williams are the two-man development team for GeekWorks LLC., based out of Minnesota, USA. They’ve had several games in the top 100 apps on the Windows Phone Marketplace.

Shuriken Ninja was originally released as paid game for $1 in April 2011, but did not do very well. A few months later they switched to Microsoft Advertising’s monetization solution and have not looked back since.

“We were pretty floored that Shuriken Ninja has been so popular. We were obviously able to make more money as a free game with ads.” said Mat Newport of Geekworks.

Geekwork’s other Matt, Matt Williams said:

“Microsoft Advertising seemed like the right choice. It was easy to get started, and then go back to doing what we love, programming the games. …the return we get from utilizing pubCenter cannot be discounted. It is what allows us to devote a significant amount of our time to planning, designing, and coding. ”

Their game currently receives 900 to 1,200 downloads a day with a total of 436,349 downloads of Shuriken Ninja since its launch. Across all of their games, they’ve reached 145M impressions, at an average of $1.69 eCPM.

Have our readers heard of any other developer success stories? Let us know below.

Via WPCentral.com

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Microsoft Germany running AppRevolution Contest

April 19, 2012 | By Surur

Talking about Microsoft Germany, the company is running a contest with Nokia where they are giving away 100 Nokia Lumia 800 handsets for developers writing apps for the Windows Phone platform.

On this occasion they want more than junk apps however, requiring developers use at least 5 Windows Phone 7 features, presumable like live tiles, pinnable secondary tiles etc.

Read more about the contest at Microsoft Germany here.

Thanks Fahd for the tip.

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Nokia enticing developers with cash and prizes!

April 18, 2012 | By andrewbares

If you live in one of Nokia’s selected cities (in the United States & Canada) and are a software developer, you can earn “cash, devices, and prizes” for attending and writing some apps on Windows Phone starting May 10th!

To sign up, go to Nokia’s The Code Warrior website and enter your email address. Then, visit the Eventbrite site to register your attendance to one of the events! The cities are:

Houston, TX – 5/10/2012
Columbus, OH – 5/12/2012
Atlanta, GA – 5/15/2012
Chicago, IL – 5/17/2012
Sunnyvale, CA – 5/19/2012
San Diego, CA – 6/2/2012
New York, NY – 6/5/2012
Vancouver, BC – 6/5/2012
Boston, MA – 6/7/2012
Miami, FL – 6/7/2012
Dallas, TX – 6/12/2012
Chevy Chase, MD – 6/12/2012
Toronto, ON – 6/12/2012

If this Nokia event is anything like previous Microsoft events I attended, you don’t need much coding experience at all. As prizes, I expect them to be giving away Windows Phones and maybe even Xbox Kinects, as Microsoft has previously done with their developer events.

Microsoft and Nokia have been heavily promoting developers to write for Windows Phone 7 through various prizes and events. Keep reading WMPoweruser to hear about the latest events!

Via Neowin.net

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Taptitude developers getting over 1 million ad impressions per day, earns $100,000 in Windows Phone Marketplace

April 18, 2012 | By Surur

Taptitude is a game by 4Bros Studios which consists of a collection of mini-games that the developer regularly updates with extra mini-games, and which are tied together by in-game upgrades and achievements, which keeps current users engaged with the app.

It seems their development strategy is doing pretty well, with the team seeing an exponential increase in their ad impressions in recent months, seemingly related to an influx of new users to Nokia’s new handsets.

This has seen the team recently cross the $100,000 revenue mark from their game, and at the moment are earning around $1400 per day.

The team notes:

Windows Phone is a rapidly growing market where indie developers can be successful. We are looking forward to an even better second year as indie game developers, and can’t wait for Windows 8!

Read more about their success at their blog here. Taptitude can be found in Marketplace here.

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MoVend and Nokia try and fix Windows Phone 7 In-app payment situation

April 14, 2012 | By Surur

Windows Phone 7 does not have a real in-app payment solution. Even in the few instances where it is available, it has been limited to Xbox Live titles, which are obviously not available to regular developers.

Microsoft does however allow 3rd party in-app payment solutions to exist in Marketplace, and one such solution is cross-platform payments solutions app provider MoVend.

MoVend provides in-app payments solutions that allows developers to activate multiple payments on Android, Windows Phone and Blackberry platforms, using just a single SDK library. Typically, developers who want to enable multiple local payments will need to integrate a lot of different SDKs provided by the different payment gateways, but MoVend streamlines this process by aggregating all these payment channels into one.

They do provide a WP7 SDK, but so far uptake has been poor. Now Microsoft has paired up with Nokia to promote the service.

Developers in in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia stand to win $2000 worth of Nokia Lumia handsets for downloading and integrating the solution into their apps and then submitting the XAP file via MoVend’s online dashboard. Apps submitted will be judged by a panel from Nokia and MoVend based on Design (25%), Usability (50%) and Creativity (25%).

“We are getting really good uptake with the latest Windows Phone 7 phones that are launched in recent months. We want to encourage more developers to develop WP7 apps with MoVend as it will benefit both the users (to have more quality apps) and developers (who can monetize through IAP on the platform). Some of the apps that are launched recently with us are doing really well… and we want to help developers in this region do the same,” said Stream Media CEO Chua Zi Yong.

The contest is open from the 2 April – 15 May and judging will conclude on the 23 May 2012.

Read more about the contest at Movend.com here.

Via Techwireasia.com

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ChevronWP7 shuts down, handsets to be re-locked in 120 days

April 13, 2012 | By Surur

It seems the experiment of providing cheap developer unlock for Windows Phones have come to an abrupt halt, with ChevronWP7 shutting down and unlocked handsets automatically relocking in 120 days.

Of course after selling $90,000 worth of unlock tokens in about 2 months from November last year, the ChevronWP7 team did close down any further sales in January already for unclear reasons.

Those reasons have now been revealed – apparently the aim was “ First, to determine if we could supercharge the Windows Phone beginner/hobbyist community by removing the initial cost barrier (i.e. App Hub membership.) And second, to convert potential developers into published developers.”

Apparently the second goal (ie Microsoft’s goal) did not quite work out as expected. It should really not have come as any surprise – the unlock was really only for non-technical users who wanted to use homebrew apps, and any developer who was remotely serious about developing for marketplace would as easily pay $9 as $99.

For the 10,000 people who have already unlocked their handsets however all is not lost – If they are in a supported country they can sign up for App Hub, and Microsoft will refund their $99 cost within 60 days. If you are not in a supported country however it appears you are out of luck.

Supporting the Home Brew community in a limited fashion won Microsoft a lot of goodwill. With this really falling away, while the home brew community is blooming at the other end, one wonders what kind of backlash Microsoft can expect.

Marketplace App Hub suffers growing pains, Microsoft to respond with upgrades

April 12, 2012 | By Surur

Writing on the Windows Team Blog, Todd Brix, Senior Director, Windows Phone Marketplace, has acknowledges what many developers have been complaining about; that App Hub has become slow and unresponsive, and certification of app submissions has slowed down.

Brix blamed this in part of being overwhelmed by the growth of marketplace, with hundreds of apps being submitted each day, and a large number of app updates also.

He noted that they were “in the process of developing a more robust and scalable Marketplace service that will address current problems and pave the way for the even more rapid growth” but that in the short term they would be addressing the issue by adding more server capacity to better handle the increased load and streamlining the processes to accelerate the rate at which apps can be ingested, certified, and published, with the changes starting to roll out in 10 days.

He did however note not to expect dramatic changes, but that average app certification time has already dropped to around 2.6 days.

It is expected that Marketplace will surpass 100,000 apps in the next 6 weeks, and if the Nokia Lumia 900 is indeed a success in USA this rate of growth will only accelerate.

Todd committed to keeping the developer community informed of updates and improvements and to listen and respond to complaints .

Read his full post here.

Via MobilityDigest.com

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Microsoft Confirms That Current Windows Phone Apps Will Run On Windows Phone 8

April 6, 2012 | By Pradeep

This is not the first time Microsoft has confirmed about the app compatibility on Windows Phone 8, but Microsoft again mentioned about it today. When discussing about the Windows 8 and current Windows Phone development opportunities Microsoft blogged the following,

With regard to existing applications: today’s Windows Phone applications and games will run on the next major version of Windows Phone. Driving application compatibility is a function of Microsoft’s commitment to its developers. Regardless of what we release in terms of new developer features and functionality, we have made a large investment in protecting your existing investments.

Microsoft also discussed about the Silverlight development platform,

We’ve also heard some developers express concern about the long term future of Silverlight for Windows Phone. Please don’t panic; XAML and C#/VB.NET development in Windows 8 can be viewed as a direct evolution from today’s Silverlight. All of your managed programming skills are transferrable to building applications for Windows 8, and in many cases, much of your code will be transferrable as well. Note that when targeting a tablet vs. a phone, you do of course, need to design user experiences that are appropriately tailored to each device.

My prediction is that, Windows Phone 8 development platform will be made similar to Windows 8. You can write the code behind using either C# or C++ or whatever and the UI will be based on WinRT. As an extra effort, Microsoft will also provide an environment that will allow existing Windows Phone 7 apps to run on new Windows Phone 8 platform without any changes. Read more on this here.

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200 Million Android users, 411 sales

April 5, 2012 | By Surur

We have on occasion received tips from disillusioned Marketplace developers when the performance of their apps have not met their expectations. Often these emails end with the statement that Marketplace is not worth the investment.

One such email was from the maker of Arachna, a free maze game exclusively for WP7. He complained that after 2 months of sales he only managed 200 downloads in around 60 days, and that he expects if he developed for Android and maybe even iOS he could have done a lot better.

The example of Papermill on Android should act as a reminder that the grass is not always greener on the other side.

They developed their Android Instapaper app at the cost of around $30,000, mainly in labour, and their app was featured The Verge, LifeHacker and BeautifulPixels. With the app already successful on iOS one would have expected thousands of sales.

Instead, after 3 week of sales, they only managed a 411 sales and $1630.12 in revenue. Once the media spotlight moves on from the app sales are expected to drop further.

The lesson the Papermill developer learned? Android users do not like to pay for apps.

The take away for Windows Phone 7 developers is that a larger user base does not necessarily mean significantly more sales, especially when looking at the Android platform.

Via The Verge.com

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Nokia Lumia 610 Video Playback Capabilities Differs From Other Lumia Devices

March 27, 2012 | By Pradeep

Apart from the lack of background agents and few other features lacking from regular Windows Phone devices, Windows Phone Tango devices like Lumia 610 will also have less video playback capabilities than other regular Windows Phone devices. As per the guide to developers from Nokia,

…..

Video in a supported format but encoded in a codec not supported with hardware acceleration or at higher bitrates or resolutions than the Windows Phone baseline, may either fail to playback or be rendered in software. If software rendering occurs playback will be poor — jumpy and choppy.

For example, a video using the VC1 codec Advanced or Main profiles may play through software rendering, instead of hardware acceleration, but if the encoded bitrate is too high it will fail.

7x27a-powered phones impose limitations on the video they can play. These limitations have been implemented to account for the lower processing capacity and memory of these phones. However, by re-encoding your video and making use of the techniques outlined in this article you can preserve your apps UX and continue to offer your users a rich video experience.

Read full codec/bitrate breakdown and more on this at the source link below.

Source: esphoneblog

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Big App On Campus winners announced

March 26, 2012 | By Surur

Microsoft has announced the winners of the “Big App on Campus” contest, which encouraged students to develop for the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace.

For the contest the apps were divided into free and paid categories, with each winner receiving $15,000. In addition two People’s Choice winners, based on a Facebook vote, received $2,500.

Winners were chosen 75% by the number of downloads their app received and 25% by the number of likes on the contest’s Facebook page.

The winner in the Paid category was our own Andrew Bares’ Power Planner app, an app described as the "ultimate homework planner", which helps students stay on track with their classes. The app has 163 reviews and a 5-star average and is $1.99+free trial.

The winner in the free category is Ninja Fruit by Jeremiah Isaacson of the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. In Ninja Fruit you play Green Lime, a citrus warrior seeking revenge on the millions of human ninjas who’ve been slicing and dicing your fellow fruit on a daily basis.

The first People’s Choice award went to ScanBizCards by Chevon Christie of CUNY/Hunter College. His business card app uses the phone camera to scan the info on a card and add it to your contacts and is $6.99+free trial.

The second People’s Choice went to Baconit and Quinn Damerell of Purdue University for his well-designed Reddit app, which has nearly 1000 ratings and a 5-star average.

When asked what he will do with his $15,000 winnings Andrew said “Repay my parents for all the things they have done for me. After that, I may possibly buy a used motorcycle, or be responsible and invest in some stocks! But hey, motorcycles get 50 MPG, I would call that responsible!”

Jeremiah responded to the same question by saying: “The funds will go to college expenses, to support a great non-profit organization called Kiva.org, to purchasing a new development laptop so that I can continue to develop apps when I am on the go, and a portion will go into savings.”

Read more about the contest at the Windows Team Blog here.

Via AAWP

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