Home » marketplace » Publishing WindowsPhone apps compared to “walking barefoot on broken glass”.

Publishing WindowsPhone apps compared to "walking barefoot on broken glass".

Toshl, a company who help people with keeping track of their finances, decided to make a move & make a Windows Phone app, to go alongside their Android, Symbian & iPhone offerings.

The found however, that publishing the app to the Windows Phone marketplace itself was not as easy as they had hoped.

In the blog post (which can be found here) they describe the various problems they ran into along the way, such as not being able to publish from various countries, the marketplace not accepting their credit cards and complications regarding the marketplace’s “ridiculous ”morality” standards“.

Other problems they have faced include the horribly slow and glitchy publishing portal (create.msdn.com) and not being able to switch apps from one account to another, a problem which I have ran into myself (apparently, the marketplace simply cannot do it, which is a little stupid in my opinion). Being a developer myself, I have both experienced and heard about far too many problems caused by the Windows Phone marketplace.

Despite all these problems, Toshl got their app onto the marketplace in the end, and if you fancy checking it out, you can find it here.

Luckily, its not all doom and gloom… sort of.
It has been said that Microsoft know that the marketplace and have been working on the ‘marketplace 2.0‘ so to speak. Whether these improvements will come to the Windows Phone 7.x marketplace or if they are reserved for Windows Phone 8 is yet to be seen.

As said in a comment on the blog, what ever happened to ‘developers! developers! developers! developers….”

Ballmer - developers developers

Nirbhay

This is not good news…microsoft needs to pull up their socks if they want to get at least somewhere near android, and ios. These are some of the many small yet irritating issues that bother me as a user and a fan of windows phone. Hope they are listening! [Posted from the 1800PocketPC app]
Francis Thibault

I have to agree. Took 3 takes to have my app approved. Last mistake was to click on a wrong link who restarted the submission process…
JJ

I tried once few months ago when working on a iOS app for my client. This is the first time I am developing for iOS. I am actually a windows phone developer. Comparing my experience of app submission for both apple and Microsoft, Microsoft provide much faster, easier experience. In order to submit for apple, i have a whole list of task to do before actual submission, numerous certs download and upload kind of stuff needs to be done. I end up spending almost 1 hour doing so while following some PDF guide downloaded from elsewhere. Even during actual submission of the app file took a long time, i dont know why does the OS X only uploader took so long for almost 30 mins just to get app file of less than 1mb onto their server. My experience for appstore is not good at all .
Charly

I like microsoft, love my lumia, and am definitely a fan of Windows Phone… but they do need to step up their game! BB10 might get past them easily, considering they wil be able to run android apps.