We just passed Marketplace Certification Test, what a ride!

If you follow @CarbonWP on Twitter you’d know about our journey with WP7 Marketplace and our app submission rounds. We finally made it, we received that sudden e-mail from Yalla Apps yesterday saying “Congratulations! Your app Carbon v.1.1 just passed Marketplace certification test”. And a few minutes we requested it to be published to Marketplace. Time to wait that 24 hours before getting published. So there it is!

Being behind the Marketplace walls for a bit

Our first submission was a total fail on our part as we missed some of the settings in the lingual department. Oh and another embarrassing mistake on our part was submitting the app with a slightly different title than app’s original title(submission title: Carbon for Twitter, actual title: Carbon). This comes from our webOS background and how we submitted to the App Catalog as we could have a different title in the App Catalog rather than the simple one word app name “Carbon”.

2nd Trial was a bit messy. We received the results, looked at our failing points, couldn’t understand it. So we consulted some of the developers around and were told that’s random, try another submission.

3rd Trial, we submitted the same file, the same information were entered in the submission form. But! We then received different results. It was about offensive content to China, Indonesia and Malaysia. Hah!? We did read about the new countries that were added to Marketplace and were warned about content published for these countries, we did know that Twitter is blocked in China but really didn’t know an app couldn’t be submitted for the mentioned three countries if it’s a Twitter app.

4th Trial, now this one was the moment of truth. We resubmitted, the same file, edited our submission, deselected World Wide Publishing and selected countries manually, although China, Indonesia and Malaysia were not even on the list of the countries on Yalla Apps’ website we manually selected countries and pressed that submit button.

This time around we received a list of policy points that we failed to meet. A big list. Three of’em with some really general explanations. So, back to the policies document to dig those terms and policies again. We didn’t get it. It really isn’t understood. After a few trials looking around Forums and emailing Yalla Apps we were a bit disappointed and thought we should take a break from the project and tweeted that. To our shock we got all kinds of support after that. Richard Kerris first reached to us on Twitter and then over e-mail.

A few hours later Brandon Watson tweeted to us:

https://twitter.com/#!/BrandonWatson/statuses/161306988737867777

And it blew up over the Twitters, Joshua Topolsky felt sorry for us too, he tweeted about it

https://twitter.com/#!/joshuatopolsky/status/161357449171968001

The marathon of keeping up with Tweets and e-mails started. Brandon Watson(ex Developer Experience Director at Microsoft, just moved to Amazon), got us in direct contact with a lead in Market Place team to assist us with our submission and understanding the policies that we failed. A few e-mails and we knew exactly what we were supposed to do. So simple! And with all the help and support from Windows Phone, Marketplace, and even the good folks at Yalla Apps we finally made it through.

So what did we fix to get our app to pass?

Although location services were off by default in Carbon and users have to enable it, and then have to choose to geo-tag their tweets, it turns out we needed a Privacy Policy document/screen, so we added that to the app. Another thing we needed to do was providing a test Twitter Account for the testers to use, huh? Exactly, so we made that test account and filled it up with tweets and the works. That’s all, that simple!

The moral of the story as your grandma would tell you after your bed time story, Windows Phone team rocks! Yalla Apps team is really supportive, and oh man our beloved followers on Twitter who kept up the positive attitude and supported us all the way and did not give up on us. Oh wait, the moral of the story, c’mon Marketplace team! Better documentation! Explain the terms, please!

All that’s behind us now as we wait for Carbon to be published to the Marketplace. Can’t wait to see y’all tweeting in Carbon stillo!