Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Submitting an AppMakr app to the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace

I made a Windows Phone 7 app using AppMakr for reading Lean-related content from prominent Lean bloggers. That was easy, but there didn’t appear to be any instructions for how to get the app added to the App Hub. So here they are.

Log into your AppMakr account. There are a number of ways to get to your build. Either click the “App Builds” link in the top navigation or click the “Builds” button on one of your applications (as shown in the image below).

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Pick the latest build that you want to submit to the marketplace and click the Download App button.

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You will be presented with a dialog to open or save the zip file. Choose to save it to a location on your PC.

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Important: Rename the file extension from .zip to .xap (which is the Silverlight application package deployment file). You will have to create the necessary Windows Phone 7 iconography (icons and screenshots needed for submitting to the app hub). You may be able to use some of the ones you used to create the application in AppMakr.

You will need an App Hub Developer account to submit applications to the Windows Marketplace ($99/year). After you have that, log in and from the “my dashboard” navigation link, select “Windows Phone”.

Click the “submit new app” button.

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Fill out the form fields. Click inside the Application package box with the Plus (+) sign. A file open dialog will appear. Select the .xap file that you renamed after downloading from AppMakr earlier.

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Continue through the process of providing an application description and uploading the necessary icon images. After you finish, sit back and wait for your app to go through the testing and certification process.

 

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Were you successful in getting your app through the testing phase of the application submission? Mine came back with errors regarding not catching exceptions. Google makes the process a lot more simple. I have successfully submitted apps to the Android Marketplace.
I was just curious if anyone has had any luck submitting AppMakr apps to the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace.

Dean Willson said...

Gavin, yes, it was accepted on first submission. I even updated it adding more RSS feeds and the update certified without errors also.