BlackBerry® World™ Development

[mapleleafs90]

Also make sure there is an option to cancel a ticket from within the isv portal. Currently you need to fill out that form and hope they read it before the ticket gets looked at.

[silver20]

sorry, think the 2nd part of that got pasted into the wrong reply, was meant for another thread... can't edit it now

[samyotte]

Hey guys, wanted to follow up. I've finished discussing this with the team, and moving forward short term, we're going to alter our processes moving forward to help catch this. Beyond that, we'll work with product management to review ui changes, etc to help streamline this for you.

Thanks

[silver20]

Thank you, and it has been very good recently, approval of new apps also.

[adwiv]

My request is to let us know the upcoming changes in the portal / appworld before they are rolled out so that we can be prepared for them.

Right now everytime they rollout a new version, there are a lot of surprises. And sometimes it takes weeks before we discover the changes that are affecting us.

[samyotte]

Agreed. We're working on an improved comms plan for that.

[meanman]

Can we have a per build version/submission metadata feature ? This should sort out many of the proposed issues.

Say the current version of my app is 1.0. I want to submit version 1.1, which has a new really super important feature with a new screenshot. In the current process I have to delete all existing screenshots, add in the new screenshot at the beginning and then add the rest of the screenshots.

Once submitted, the app will have no screenshots for users to view. A few days later version 1.1 will get approved. Still no screenshots either from the previous version or the new version. User/dev have to wait for a few screenshots to get approved! This can dramatically affect sales.

Another important point:

You may as well just accept metadata as it comes through, and remove it if it violates one of your policies. Have a report tool. If a vendor does something nasty (unlikely) just ban their app. The current delays are just pointless, I don't believe anybody checks the metadata anyway. Here is an example of the description from a top-selling util:

"...the app will automatically detect the processes that drain your battery and optimize battery life"

Really? How is that even possible? Is there an API call that allows us to see how much battery per process cycle an app is using? Unless I'm missing something anyone with a bit of understanding of the SDK knows this isn't even possible.

So my point being you may as well let everything through by default.

[jtegen]

It seems that an solution would be to create a package for every new release. By default, it will set/copy the current photos, descriptions, pricing, etc. for the new release, and then the developer can modify the contents of the package (BAR files, photos, etc.) for the new release. Then in theory, with a package, you could roll back to a previous package when things go wrong. Would just need to specify which package is the current released package.

[meanman]

I like the package idea, but to extend on it: Currently App World allows us to create a release.xml file which specifies which devices a particular OS build belongs to. This is a huge time saver. But how about being able to add screenshots, with their positions etc directly into the xml file? This way many devs could integrate it nicely into their ANT scripts, it will save so much time and manual labour. Here is an example:

<Release version="2.4.0">
<ReleaseNotes>
   Hello World with new features!
</ReleaseNotes>
<filebundle name="HelloWorld">
   <language>en</language>	
</filebundle>
<!-- New sample sections -->
<shortDescription>Hello World!</shortDescription>
<description>
	<en>English description</en>
</description>
<screenshots>
    <screenshot name="Main" position="1" resource="/screenshots/1.png"/> <!-- Path inside the zip file -->
</screenshots>
<featuredImage/>
<featuredIcon resource="480x480icon.png"/>
</Release>

[jtegen]

Not familiar with this with BB10/PB releases, but the idea to do all this from the IDE or a desktop app (please no Java apps -- too slow) would be really nice. Prep everything, verify and then push a button to upload. That would be nice.