WP7 Developer Unlocking – New Details On Sideloading
Long Zheng has reported that at TechEd today they went into more details on unlocking. And folks, you may not want to hear all of it. Here’s the deal – for $99 a developer can unlock 3 phones (more may be considered on request). That was known already. The new news is the method to unlock. There’s a PC side app that simply asks for the Live ID to be registered on the phone. “The process simply flags that device in the cloud backend and does not change the phone ROM in any way. Once completed, developers can view through the Marketplace website which contains a listing of all their registered devices as well as removing the device registration.” So unlocking is not really an on-device change. This is really MS, on their server, so I question if this means you can freely sideload the way we all thought it would happen. I think the end results is that you may need to upload the app to a private cloud (like beta testing) and then load it to your phone. It’s a controlled environment.
The more I think about it the less I really care. WP7 is being delivered with a working core experience and apps will matter less with it since the OS itself is one massive fully functional app. But that’s me. Tell me why I’m wrong.
Related Posts
About The Author
…”since the OS itself is one massive fully functional app.”
We can all be hopeful but based on Microsoft’s past experience developing fully functional mobile apps, I am not so sure. The sure money is still on the independent developer.
With probably 80% plus of users being satisfied with going thru the marketplace its not really an issue.
LAME! I don’t know if I’m feeling it Special K. I’m still all over the fence but that was a firm shove.
How does this work for line-of-buisness applications? we maintain some custom wm applications, but they are internal use only. Does this mean there is no way of supporting WM7, without publising our private apps to the store?
Tom, if you look at the link “(like beta testing)” in the article it will give you info on how corporations will load apps. You will get a private cloud to upload apps to and deploy to devices.
thats makeing