Todd Brix, over at the Windows Phone Developer Blog, posted Tuesday March 8 a whole list of changes, updates and information on the Windows Phone Marketplace. There is information on trial use, Ad Control, the Global Publisher Program, and changes to policies. We will quote a few of the biggest details below, but if you are a developer we urge you to hope on over at the source link and read the full post.
Windows Phone Marketplace currently offers more than 9,000 quality apps and games and enjoys a base of over 32,000 registered developers, delivering an average of 100 new apps every day. The Windows Phone Developer Tools have now been downloaded more than one million times, and we recently announced an update to let developers take advantage of OS updates such as the addition of copy and paste functionality.
1. We have raised the limit on the number of certifications that can be performed for FREE apps at no cost to the registered developer from five to 100. This was a common request from developers which we are glad to implement after building alternate methods to ensure that users can find and download high quality apps.
2. We have converted policy 5.6 – related to the inclusion of contact information for support – from a mandatory to an optional policy. This is still a strongly recommended best practice, but we recognized and responded to developer feedback that this policy was creating excessive drag on the certification process for developers without commensurate user benefit for all apps.
3. We also understand the desire for clarification with regard to our policy on applications distributed under open source licenses. The Marketplace Application Provider Agreement (APA) already permits applications under the BSD, MIT, Apache Software License 2.0 and Microsoft Public License. We plan to update the APA shortly to clarify that we also permit applications under the Eclipse Public License, the Mozilla Public License and other, similar licenses and we continue to explore the possibility of accommodating additional OSS licenses.
Leave a Reply