Two weeks ago, I submitted a Windows Phone app for certification. Twenty minutes later, I received an email saying my app had passed certification. I shook my head and couldn’t believe it. When the app was available in the store an hour later, I thought that Microsoft must have had a bug in the certification process. For months, the processing time for apps had been 4-5 days. The next day, the Windows Phone blog published a post explaining the new process. It cleared up my confusion.
For every change that Microsoft does, there are always people who will complain. Personally, I was extremely happy with this change. When I submitted my first app in January 2011, it took me a full week to obtain the certification result. Unfortunately, my first submission didn’t pass. I’ll always remember that the failure was due to an issue that occurred after 17 steps. The tester actually wrote those 17 steps down for me. I was impressed that they were so thorough. I knew they were also attentive to whether an app would work well in the light and dark theme and that the hardware back button needed to work perfectly.
Many updates and new apps later, I found myself getting more and more impatient to get the certification results. It is always wonderful when certification is successful, but when it fails, I had the impression I was losing two weeks. The wait was sometimes even more problematic if an app had a recurrent crash that users were facing and the testers didn’t catch it. It is stressful and you feel powerless. Contacting Microsoft to speed up the process was impossible, because an external agency deals with app certification.
If a developer is serious about marketing a new app, he will be careful and he is most likely to beta test his app with users/testers. If he doesn’t care about testing his app, he might get punished in reviews and ratings. It is not because an app is free that users decrease their expectations. Users don’t hesitate to raise their voice when issues arise.
For these reasons, I prefer that apps get approved quickly and I feel it is the responsibility of the developer to make his app shine with few or no hiccups!
What are your thoughts?
PS: The process doesn’t to apply to every new app and update yet, but it will soon. Be patient!
One of the challenges of a developer is to promote his applications. For the last three years, I have been active with the developers especially with the Windows Phone expertise. I have seen countless of Windows Phone links. Last year, on my favourite social network Twitter, they introduced a feature that lets you preview an image with a fixed size directly on your twitter feed. In January, I was pondering how to take advantage of this new feature. I came up with a simple idea, which became App Promo.
App Promo has two goals. The first one is to help developers promote their applications in a more attractive way than simply providing a download link. The second is to help people download an app more quickly. I find that downloading an app via a QR Code is both convenient and fast.
I have created two applications one for Windows and one Windows Phone. Both applications have the goal of creating a promotional picture for a Windows Phone app. Each version has its own advantages.
App Promo for Windows
Features • Share the promotional pictures using the Share charm • Share the promotional pictures into disk • Background color can be changed • A custom URL can be used in the QR-Code
The Windows Store version is FREE. You can pay to remove ads.
App Promo for Windows Phone
Features • Share the promotional pictures on Twitter and Facebook • Share the promotional pictures with installed applications • Retrieve the promotional pictures from your Camera Roll
The Windows Phone version is FREE. You can pay to remove ads.
The process of creating an application does not only involve developing it. As discussed in a previous blog post, the marketing is a crucial aspect. There is another important aspect that we tend to avoid or not taking seriously enough: the testing phase, which I call the beta phase.
No matter which platform you build your app for, you need to test your app at some point. Yes, you worked really hard for many weeks and months on your app. Yes, you know your app by heart. Yes, it is bug free.
I don’t want to disappoint you, but there is always a little something that you didn’t think of, or a special usage scenario you didn’t pay attention to.
I speak from experience. I have submitted apps without doing a beta phase. I have also submitted an app where a crash could be easily reproduced. It is nothing to be proud of, but at least now, I do a beta phase.
Advertise on social networks that you are looking for testers. In my case with DualShot, I tweeted about it at two different times.
Believe me, you’ll get testers pretty easily. People are curious. Depending on how well known you are, you can keep track of the emails manually like I do or you can share an Excel sheet or use MailChimp like one of my friends does.
Unless you pay the testers, don’t expect to get feedback from everyone. This is normal, so don’t take it personally. Sometimes it is just not the tester’s type of app, or perhaps they are just too busy.
Tip: I use BugSense to keep track of crashes and I use Flurry for the analytic events. I highly recommend using these services (or any equivalent services) during the beta phase. As I previously mentioned, you might not get written feedback from all the testers, but at least you’ll receive traces of what they did with your app.
During the beta phase, the tester can provide feedback about the user experience (UX). As a concrete example, in DualShot, Vincent designed the following page:
I really liked this page and I didn’t see a problem using it. When I submitted the beta to my testers, in the same evening, three users complained that the UX was really bad. It was clear to us that we needed to put more work into that view. We ended up with the following design:
Unless you have the complete Windows Phone collection at home, you are most likely going to have only one or two devices to test with. When you have testers, you increase the chances that the app will be tested with many different Windows Phones. Don’t assume that all Windows Phone 8s from different manufactures behave the same. In DualShot, the image capture with some HTC 8XT (only this model) does not work. We didn’t have a tester with this rare device and Murphy’s Law struck again.
Not only will the testers find bugs/crashes and give you feedback, they will often give you two thumbs up. It will give you the extra energy to polish your app before certification.
Windows Phone
If you are developing a Windows Phone app, you are lucky because the Windows Phone team developed a feature in their portal where it is easy to run a beta phase. Essentially, you publish an app as if you were submitting it for certification. However, the app is kept private for the testers that you have specified and the certification passes automatically in the subsequent two hours.
In the Windows Phone developer portal, you need to select Beta as the Distribution channel, then you enter the list of tester email addresses (using a ‘;’ between addresses).
After that you can fill out all the info and screenshots.
Tip: avoid flooding your testers with daily emails if you submit a new beta every day. If you submit an update, the tester will be notified via the Store Live Tile. Take advantage of this automatic notification to enter all the new features/bugs into the app description. The first time that you send the deep link of the beta app, you can tell your tester to check the app description when a new update is available.
Windows 8/8.1
Unfortunately, in the current Windows developer portal, it is not possible to easily distribute an app to testers. You need to create a package and send the package to your testers. The testers then need to manually install the app. Hopefully the Windows team will soon mirror the awesome work of the Windows Phone team.
Conclusion
I know the feeling when an app is finally complete and ready to be submitted for certification. It is so tempting to submit it right away in order to see it live in the store ready to be downloaded. Please resist this temptation and do a beta phase. It is better that your friends find the problems than strangers, as strangers will most likely give you a 1-star review if they find a bug or a crash.
My friend designer Vincent and I decided to share the story of our latest app DualShot. The goal is not to be show-off. We want to show diverse statistics that can help analyze the Windows Phone market and encourage other developers and designers to continue providing quality apps.
Before starting, DualShot has two restrictions:
It is only available to Windows Phone 8 devices.
It requires a back and front face camera. In other words, the most popular devices the Nokia Lumia 520 and 521 cannot download the app, because they don’t have a front face camera.
Statistics
The launch date was September 16th. The download count surpassed 100 000 on October 15th.
Data from the Windows Phone dashboard
It’s not a big surprise that the peak arrived close to the launch date. DualShot received a lot of good press from many Windows Phone websites.
Here is the top 30 markets. We were quite surprised that India and Thailand arrived on the second and third spot despite the fact that DualShot was available in English and French only at launch. The two biggest continents with the most users are Europe and Asia.
Here is the percentage usage per device. There is no doubt that Nokia is dominating the Windows Phone market. The non-Nokia device with the biggest market share is HTC with 5.3%. Looking forward, I’ll be curious to see how the Lumia 1020/925 will evolve. Their percentages are low because they are new and not available worldwide yet.
Data from Flurry analytics service
Concerning the reviews, there is a clear relation between the number of reviews and the downloads. The American were the most critics about our app!
Developing an app is one step, but advertise an app is another step. I’m not a firm believer that submitting an app without talking about it that the app will become popular.
The day before the app went live, we contacted a lot of editors and friends. A full day can be easily spent sending all the information.
For those who noticed, we created a little teaser on September 26th. It turned out that the one-day teaser worked well.
Post-launch
At this point, this is where the team has less control. It is the turn to the public to decide about the success of the app. It is also on the hands of the editors if they want to talk or not about the app. This is the most exciting and stressful period where the team awaits the result.
In the case of DualShot, we were very happy with the first days following the launch. In reality, it surpassed our expectations.
We were delight to see a YouTube review from our friends at WinSource:
We had a review on a Microsoft Canadian website and many more sites.
Ranking
Having a lot of tractions at launch caused a positive domino effect. The more an app is downloaded, the more it appears on different categories. At some point DualShot was the top New+Rising app in USA.
A week later, the download count probably caused a trigger on the algorithm of Microsoft to display the spotlights. With the help of my app App Spotlights, I was able to detect that DualShot was on the spotlight of many markets on October 4th.
Later on, we had one occasion with the big spot in the USA spotlight page. We can see the effect on the graphic at the top of the blog post.
So far, we had a lot of exposures:
Conclusion
While we didn’t make any money from releasing DualShot because we made it free, we had so much fun following the launch. It surely motivates us to create more Windows Phone apps. Now that the Windows Phone market is not small anymore, we see a lot of opportunities and we encourage developers and designers to jump in. You can also be surprised with the result.
Have you create a DualShot photo yet? If not, go download and share your creation!
Your app is feature complete, here is what you should consider before sending it to the certification. Add a page that contains at least three sections:
About
What’s new
Credits
About
The first goal of an about section is providing a way to your users to connect with you. For DualShot, I provide diverse links. The important one is Support & Feedback. It opens the mail editor. I take the opportunity to enter information that might help like the current version of the app, language and the phone model.
Providing a way to contact you won’t prevent all bad ratings, but it will save you some if you respond accordingly.
In the list above, there is another interesting link called User Voice. User Voice is a website that provides a (free) service where user can enter anonymous feedback or bugs. Their website is very easy to setup and use. I have seen a lot of apps having a User Voice link. Even the Windows Phone developer team has a User Voice page.
What’s new
There are a lot of applications that provide updates, but often we are not aware of what’s new. Sometimes, they put the update description into the app’s description, but the second you click update you don’t have access to the description in one click, you need to find the app into the store. Starting with my app DualShot, I will provide a what’s new section for my future apps. Not only it tells the user what’s new, but it can help the user to discover features that are maybe not obvious at first sight.
Credits
Open your Windows Phone solution and check the references for each project. Do you see a lot of 3rd party libraries? The answer is most likely yes. Would you be able to release your app without using any free 3rd party libraries? I’m sure you can, but it would take a lot more time. Reinventing the wheel is probably not your motto neither. That’s been said, with my latest applications, I took the decision to thank the people bind the libraries. It doesn’t cost a dime to give a two thumbs up for the creators. For each library and translator, I put a link to their website or Twitter handle. After I released my app, I tweeted to each of time and 80% replied back.
You never know what you can expect: four gentlemen offered us to translate the app for free. It was my pleasure to put their names into the credits section.
Don’t worry, you won’t get hurt in the rating for putting a credits section. I have receive a lot of good and very bad reviews, but I never receive something related to: “Huh, your app suk and your credits too”.
Conclusion
Take the extra 2-3 hours to provide for your users to connect with you and thank the person who helps build your application directly or indirectly. If you provide updates, add a what’s new section.
Last week, I had the honor and privilege to be elected as a MVP Client Development.This award goes to people that have contributed to the community for the last twelve months in diverse ways. It is awarded every three months.
The Microsoft definition is:
The Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award is our way of saying thank you to exceptional, independent community leaders who share their passion, technical expertise, and real-world knowledge of Microsoft products with others. It is part of Microsoft’s commitment to supporting and enriching technical communities. Even before the rises of the Internet and social media, people have come together to willingly offer their ideas and best practices in technical communities.
My definition is shorter:
Love what you do, share what you know and make new friends.
I would like to thank all my developer friends and Microsoft employees who nominated me.
The title seems a bit unreal, but it is totally true and legit. Please read on.
Last year, I attended the International Startup Festival in Montreal. I met the Canadian Microsoft team who promote the Microsoft program BizSpark. You can get a quick summary of BizSpark at Woot Studio.
As a Windows Phone or Windows 8 developer you will be interested in:
1-year of a Windows Phone Store developer account.
1-year of a Windows Store developer account.
MSDN Ultimate which includes Visual Studio Ultimate, Windows 8, and Office.
$150 per month of Windows Azure.
Before I met the Microsoft evangelists, I thought that BizSpark was only for registered/incorporated businesses. I was wrong.
The requirements to be eligible for BizSpark are:
You are making less than one million in revenue per year. If this is not the case, you don’t need BizSpark!
Your startup or business has less than 10 employees.
Your business should be less than 5 years old.
The last requirement is that you need to develop software. Be careful; you need to develop your own software. In other words, you need to sell a product. A company that develops software for clients is not eligible for BizSpark.
What if you already have Windows Phone apps or Windows Store apps published? You are probably entitled to get BizSpark.
The last requirement is that you need a professional-ish website with a non-personal email. The best example of a professional-ish website is the website that you are reading! If you don’t have a website, I encourage you to create one. It is a bit of work, but it is highly worth it. I can’t guarantee that you’ll be 100% eligible to get BizSpark following my steps, but it has worked for two of my friends and me. It takes less than two days to find out if you are eligible.
Microsoft does not seem to check if you have a registered business.
This week, I’m “celebrating” my first year of BizSpark. This great program lasts for three years. When the program ends, you keep all the software that you have installed.
Thanks to the fact that Windows Azure is free with BizSpark, I could try Azure without worrying about the cost. In one month, I learned how easy it was to play with Azure Mobile Services, Azure SQL, Blob Storage, Virtual Machines and Azure Mobile Services. I hadn’t played with backend before and I was able to release my Windows Phone application App Spotlights that uses all the above-mentioned technology.
Conclusion
If you are an Indie developer selling software, try subscribing to BizSpark.
I’m pleased to announce the availability of App Spotlights.
As a Windows Phone developer, I can tell you that one of the best gifts a developer can receive is when one of his apps is in the spotlight. First, it’s an honor from Microsoft to be selected and secondly, it has a huge impact on downloads. Currently, there is no easy way to know if an app is featured, as there are 121 markets. The main feature of this app is to notify the developers with a live tile notification and a toast when an app is in the spotlight.
App Spotlights is a perfect companion for Windows Phone app buyers and an indispensable tool for developers.
Windows Phone Buyers: ★ Access to more than 2400 spotlighted apps from all 121 markets every day. ★ Have more confidence when buying a spotlighted app. ★ Consult three charts to find out the most spotlighted apps in the marketplace. ★ Navigate faster than the built-in Store app when looking for spotlighted apps.
Windows Phone Developers: ★ Get notified when your apps are in the spotlights in any markets. Share the news with potential buyers on your favourite social networks. ★ Obtain a detailed history when your apps were in the spotlight in each market. ★ Analyze the impact on your downloads when your apps are in the spotlight. ★ Track the visibility of your competitors.
Other features: ★ Toast and Live Tile notifications. ★ Lock screen information from App Spotlights can be used. ★ Fast loading and resume.
Note: Spotlight statistics have been calculated since February 17th 2013.
Before I start this review, I would like to thank my employer, Mirego, for offering me a trade-in of my Surface RT for a Surface Pro! As a technology lover, it was impossible to say no.
This week, I called a couple of Future Shops (I live in Montreal, Canada), Best Buys and Staples. After multiple calls to Staples, I was never able to talk with a human, they are apparently too busy. Future Shop (sister company of Best Buy) answered me, but said that they didn’t have any info concerning the Saturday availability. However, there was a nice lady on Wednesday who took my name over the phone at Best Buy Marché Central to let me know the minute they were going to receive the Surface Pro. I didn’t hold my breath. However, Friday night at 8:50, she called to give me the news that the truck didn’t have any Surface Pros. I was kind of disappointed sine earlier in the week, Best Buy announced that all the Canadian stores would have some. She told me that Best Buy at Anjou would have some. I wasn’t about to start holding my breath…
Saturday morning, I made sure to arrive 30 minutes before the store opening. I was not sure if I would have face a line up or not. Luckily, the line up 10 minutes before the opening looked like this:
The security guard saw me taking a picture and asked me why I was taking a picture and why I was so early. It’s the Surface Pro launch my friend!
9:00 arrived and I went straight to the computer section. I was so happy when I saw this display:
The salesman was friendly enough and we chatted for a while. The employees were looking forward to the Surface Pro.
At the Microsoft BUILD conference, I received the touch keyboard with my Surface RT, but I was not a huge fan of the keyboard. This time, I selected the type keyboard. One thousand three hundred and one dollars (with taxes) later, I was out with the 128 GB version:
When I first turned on the Surface Pro and saw the Start menu, my reaction was that it has an amazing screen. It is sharp and crisp (thanks to the HD resolution). I launched a whole bunch of apps to see how fast and fluid the Surface Pro is. To give you a better idea, here is a video that my friend Matthieu took:
Load time fight between a Surface Pro and a Surface RT
Convinced? I am.
My second test was the type keyboard. Short review: it is night and day compared to the touch keyboard. I love it. It feels like a regular keyboard. I highly suggest the type keyboard, especially for developers.
The hidden gem of the Surface Pro is the Pen. I launched the OneNote app and I tried it. It works without lag and the eraser works well too. It will definitively be a great tool for taking notes.
Why the Surface Pro over a plethora of tablets iPad/Android? Here’s the answer:
The perfect portable solution for a developer is right here. As a bonus, we are also able to use Outlook, Live Writer, Photoshop and so on.
Comparison
Last summer, I received a prototype Ultrabook from Intel. Here are the specs:
Before I got a laptop with a touch screen, I had the mentality that using greasy fingers on the screen was a terrible idea. Sorry, I was wrong. It is such a natural way to interact with a computer in some situations especially when reading. (Expect Apple to update their MacBook with touch screen this year.) This Ultrabook with a Core i7-3667U is fast and fluid. It is a good contestant to fight with a Surface Pro with these specs:
On the load time test, surprisingly, the Surface Pro is the clear winner:
Boot time of an Ultrabook Core i7-3667U and a Surface Pro
It looks like a 10 seconds boot time for the Surface! This is cool, but nowadays we don’t have to turn off a computer all the time. Here is a normal test of launching Visual Studio 2012 (with Update 2 on both computers) and launching the debugger with the Windows 8 emulator:
Compilation time of a Windows 8 app with an Ultrabook i7-3667 and a Surface Pro
With the Surface Pro we have almost the time to breath an extra second while waiting.
Conclusion
Earlier this week, the Surface Pro received mixed reviews over the Internet. I was not surprised and in fact I didn’t care that much. Yes, the battery life of the Surface Pro is not stellar, but in real life, I’m not travelling around the world every day without a power charge for an entire day and I’m pretty sure it is the same case with the majority of users. The Surface Pro is an amazing device or whatever you’d like to call it. I’ll read, play and develop with it.
Congratulations to Microsoft and especially to the Surface team.
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