WP7 Marketplace Submission Procedure
If you're an active Windows Phone developer, or you're thinking about joining, you may have thought about what's happening to your application once you submit it to the Marketplace. This is the scenario of my latest app update, your mileage may vary but this is what you can expect in general.
1. You upload your application to the App Hub. Their system processes your XAP file and looks for obvious problems. If there is an issue, you will be notified about it and you have to upload a new XAP file that has been fixed to continue the submission.
2. Once the XAP is verified, they repackage it and you can enter various metadata on each of the supported languages of your app, such as short and long descriptions, keywords, images in various sizes and up to 8 screenshots. It's best to have these all prepared before you start submitting your app. If you actually use special features like network connectivity, device information or phone user identity request, access GPS data etc, these will be detected in your application's code and displayed on the profile page of your application on the Marketplace. For some of these there will be an extra confirmation page displayed to the customer.
3. When you filled the metadata and selected the price and the countries where your app will be available, you're done, the app is "signed and encrypted". Now you just have to wait, a lot, to have it certified.
4. Unless you submitted it really early, the app will be tested the next day by manual labor in Microsoft's User Interface Lab in Norristown, Pennsylvania. They test it with a variety of devices (like the
5. About two days later, if everything was okay during their tests, they run another test by installing the app over wifi directly from the marketplace storage, then the application will get certified and you will receive an email with a title like this: Congratulations! AppName has successfully passed certification for Windows Phone Marketplace. Now you can publish the app, unless you selected automatic publishing on getting certified.
6. The marketplace content gets refreshed once a day, at 2am in US Eastern Time. If you got your congratulations email (and published the app) before that, it will appear in the marketplace soon. Otherwise you will have to wait yet another day to get it published.
You won't see download and crash statistics showing up on the App Hub for quite some days, but don't worry, it doesn't mean that nobody cares about your app. This information gets processed with a delay of 6 days, refreshed at 8pm in US Eastern Time. User ratings appear quicker, in about an hour or so. On the App Hub you can view these only by selecting single countries to see if there is anything to see there, it's awful. You may use AppTracker instead to follow your applications and see all the user ratings and reactions.
