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CHAPTER 1 WHAT’S NEW IN WINDOWS PHONE 7
Some developers want to be able to use C# and Visual Studio tools to develop mobile applications
running on Android and iOS. This will make cross-platform design easier and enable code reuse
across these platforms. Mono-Android (
http://mono-android.net/) and Monotouch
(
http://monotouch.net/) are such tools for this purpose.
Application Store Process
The Apple App Store was the fi rst mobile application store, and had the largest number
of applications at the time of writing. Nonetheless, many mobile developers have questioned Apple’s
application review process because Apple has imposed so many restrictions and is known to hand
out mysterious rejections. Each iOS app that a developer submits is verifi ed against a functionality
policy, content policy, and legal policy, which may take days to even a few weeks.
The Android Market grew rapidly as the number of shipped Android devices increased dramatically
between 2009 and 2010. For instance, in December 2010 Google announced that it was activating
300,000 Android devices a day (
http://mashable.com/2010/12/09/android-device-stats-
2010
). The Android Market enforces content policies that disallow hate speech, nudity, sexually
explicit material, and copyright infringements. In contrast to the Apple App Store, the basic idea
of the Android Market is openness — the Android Market doesn’t perform any verifi cation of a
submitted application. Essentially, developers simply register an account, upload an application,
and describe it, and the application appears in the Android Market. Google has a team that handles
any reported violation against the content policy and may remove the application from the Market
if necessary.
The Apple iOS content policy can be found at developer.apple.com/appstore/
guidelines.html
. Google Android content policy is available at www.android
.com/us/developer-content-policy.html
.
Microsoft started to offer a mobile application store during the Windows Mobile 6.5 years. But that
effort didn’t take off, mainly because the accompanying OS release failed to earn signifi cant market
share. As part of the new Windows Phone project release, Microsoft has redesigned the Windows
Phone Marketplace to compare with the other two competitors. Furthermore, Microsoft seems
to have learned quite a bit from the problems of the Apple App Store and the Android Market,
which has resulted in a fairly comprehensive application certifi cation process that aims at verifying
a submitted application against policies and technical requirements to ensure the application is
reliable, makes effi cient use of resources, doesn’t interfere with device functionality, and is free of
malicious software. The Marketplace certifi cation process includes both static and automatic testing
of the application on API usage, stability, performance, and so on. The whole process can take as
long as a few weeks.
Table 1-3 outlines the three application store processes.
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