applications

With WP 7.5 Mango devices already rolling out around the world, like in Japan, Russia and France, it was only a matter of time before developers would be able to submit an update to their apps to work with the latest version of Windows Phone. As announced by Todd Brix on the official Windows Phone Developer Blog, you may now submit your applications to the Windows Phone Mango marketplace. For developers that are submitting updates to their existing apps that run on WP 7.0 the normal caveats apply; existing users with 7.0 devices will not receive the new functionality that comes with Mango-compatible version of your app, but they will be able to continue using the app as it is.

Unfortunately, as we've already known, this is going to be an annoyance for many of our hard-working developers who will want to update their existing apps to WP 7.5, and still update their apps for WP 7.0 users as well. Thankfully, by the end of October, that problem should be all but vanquished. The app submission process will be getting a nice change to provide developers with a dual-update path on their existing apps, meaning that they'll not be limited to adding features only for Mango device owners, but will now have a way to keep supporting their existing 7.0 users.

To help distinguish app feature-sets from 7.0 and 7.5 versions within the marketplace, a small text overlay has been created to be added to screenshots for all apps with a 7.5 upgrade path (shown above). Hopefully, this will help clear some of the confusion that users will have as they browse through app screenshots to see features that they can't access on their 7.0-based devices.

While it's nice that they'll be making this dual-update process available for developers, it's a shame that it will be so long before it arrives in October.  We can't expect them to make everything so easy on us, can we?

Source: Windows Phone Developer Blog  Thanks goes out to Terry for the tip!

In a press release today, Directed Electronics announced that it has been working with Microsoft to bring its Viper SmartStart automotive app, which allows users to lock/unlock, and of course, start their vehicle via smartphone, to the Windows Phone platform "later in the year."  In conjunction with the announcement, Microsoft representatives demonstrated a beta version for those in attendance at the BUILD conference in Anaheim, CA. 

"We're very excited about partnering with Microsoft to extend Viper SmartStart products to the Windows Phone 7 platform," said Mike Simmons, Executive VP of Directed Electronics. "Our developers were able to quickly bring the app to Windows Phone 7 because they are so familiar with the Microsoft environment."

SmartStart, created by the same Viper brand of car alarms and other accessories, has a wide range of other smartphone-based apps for the car and home, though it's not clear from the press release if all of them are equally as close to arriving for WP7.  You can see a demo of the various functions on their website.

Aside from the clear convenience of what this app brings to users, what is even more interesting is what else Simmons had to say: "We look forward to collaborating with Microsoft in other areas, including jointly developing advanced solutions for the cloud connected car."  We have seen how Microsoft has been expanding and integrating SkyDrive into Mango, so could this mean such things as cloud-based music playback for the car?  This could take the Windows brand beyond just the PC\Phone\Gaming unification that we already know is coming.

Source: PRNewsWire

A while ago Alan Mendelevich, Founder of AdDuplex, published an interesting article about apps in the Marketplace. Much like a previous Marketplace analysis by Justin Angel we take a look at a sample of available apps, but instead of looking at a Marketplace specific breakdown, Alan walks us through app capabilities.

In the image above (click the enlarge) you can see we have nine app capabilities illustrated by percentage of the 50 top apps taken in the Marketplace (July '11). To give a quick run-through, we have owner identity, location-based services, media library, web browser, phone identity, data connection, microphone, sensors and push notifications. As is to be expected, data connectivity is the most used capability within apps, but it's interesting to see owner identity and phone identity on 24% and 26% respectively.

Source: AdDuplex

This is an interesting calculation, Research2Guidance has published a report that features a chart which illustrates the comparison of average downloads per app on a number of platforms to iOS. Looking at that chart above, you can see that OVI Store (Symbian) has +160% more downloads per app on average than iOS, while Windows Phone comes second in at +80%.

Surprisingly, BlackBerry came in third at +43%. Many users on competitor platforms may complain and make remarks about the amount of apps available to WP users, but we sure have quality over quantity and it goes to show with the amount of downloads apps are accumulating. Check out our article covering Marketplace statistics and case study for more insight on WP.

Source: Research2Guidance, via: WMPU

Justin Angel, former Microsoft Silverlight Program Manager, has downloaded all Windows Phone Marketplace XAPs and analysed them. He's then gone on to provide some insightful graphs for us all to see. He ended up with 108GB and analysed 24,505 apps, looking at Obfuscation, Silverlight vs. XNA, programming language, number of cloned apps and more.

We'll get stuck into cloned apps to begin with, which Justin reports as being around 925 of the 24,505 he took into account. These are the apps that share the same functionality as each other, such as the spam that we encountered, etc. He estimated that over 20% of the Marketplace is the same app published more than once. This leaves just 18,549 apps in the Marketplace that are unique. Check out the chart after the break for a visual representation.