Mehdoh is back!

Mehdoh, disputably the best Twitter app for Windows Phone has been on a rocky road the past five weeks and officially disappeared from Marketplace a few days ago. There were a few reasons for all this, but basically it came down to nearly zero return on investment. It’s amazing that such a good app has only garnered, by my estimate, around 600 registrations (4,000 total downloads, including trials & updates) at 0.99, not leaving much to pay for development time after paying Marketplace their annual App Hub registration. After discovering that by not re-registering for another year of App Hub, Mehdoh would be pulled from the Marketplace, the Developer has decided to re-register in App Hub again (could not reactivate) and will offer Mehdoh for FREE, as it will be a “new” app and he did not want to burden current users with having to pay another 0.99. A real mess for sure.

I am trying to encourage the Developer to setup an XDA account, or at least accept PayPal contributions on his website. While he does not plan to spend lots of time with development, the extra loose change would be a way to show appreciation for some great work. If you have not tried Mehdoh, do yourself a favor and download it when it reappears in Marketplace (currently in certification). Definitely an app that deserves to be featured in Marketplace. I have purchased and tested every Twitter client currently available and actually had seven on my Start screen last week while I tried to decide what I could live with after Mehdoh disappeared. After several hours of tinkering, I deleted them all again and decided to stick with Mehdoh till it stopped working. Glad I did. And thank you Mr. Developer (still don’t know your name) for bringing Mehdoh back.

Below is the post from the developer’s blog

Back in December, due to various frustrations with the platform, I took the decision to close my App Hub (developer) account with Microsoft. It turned out that wasn’t such a smart idea! At the time I had NO IDEA that the upshot of that would be that the application would no longer be available to customers who had paid for it. I immediately sent several emails to various people and departments at Microsoft (yes, including Brandon Watson) asking for clarification and unfortunately they all eventually gave the same answer – that the account was gone, it couldn’t be recovered, and as such the application would no longer be available to re-download.

This, honestly, wasn’t acceptable to me, so I was left with a choice to make… Although thanks to a lot of very helpful people… I had several choices

1- I could hand the source code, and development, over to someone else (thank you to people who kindly offered!)

2- Someone else could host the application in their App Hub account (again thank you for those that offered to do this also!)

3- Microsoft’s suggestion, pay for a new account and re-upload it for certification again.

4- Or… forget about it…

I really did spend a lot of time contemplating choices 1 and 2… but ultimately I’d still like to retain control of the source code (it is, after all, a company asset rather than some kind of toy project) so that left 3 or 4… Well… 4 wasn’t really an option, so I have just taken Microsoft’s advice and signed up again.

OK so what does this mean? Well, it means that Mehdoh will continue to be on the store… however, as I understand it, it will NOT be the same application. ie. no reviews/downloads will carry across… and existing users WILL NOT automatically update to this new version – unfortunately even paid customers. Of course, I do not expect anyone to pay any more for the application than they may have already done, so with that in mind the application will be FREE. If you have paid for the previous version then you can rest safe in the knowledge that your investment went towards paying for the new application subscription, so thank you.

So what next? Well, if you want to carry on using the “new” Mehdoh, then you will need to download it (for FREE) as, as mentioned, under Microsoft’s rules it’s a different application. Note that as of this blog post the application is still under certification… but I will announce (via @mehdoh and www.mehdoh.com) when it’s available.

With regards to development… It will restart, albeit at a much slower pace. Previously I was putting in anything in the region of 5 or 6 hours a night, after doing a day’s work and taking care of family stuff. However going forward it will be on an as/when I can basis. The exciting part is that as I no longer own any of Windows Phones (I was using an LG Optimus 7 and a Nokia Lumia 800 for development and personal use, both were sold off) I will almost certainly be making use of the beta marketplace, something that I never did previously.

OK so what will be developed? At present I honestly don’t know… Some other bits have started, and are nearly there, but I will LIST them soon enough. I will also try and keep on top of any bug fixes (yes the submitted version has the fix for settings!). There are a few other bits that have been planned from day one, that I would still like to see in the app, but I can’t emphasise strongly enough that development will be a lot slower/sporadic than previously, so please don’t expect new releases every few weeks. Please remember that the account was taken out again primarily so that the app can stay on the store.

Anyway, Mehdoh is back, kind of!