New title screen of "The Journey" - now based on pure vector graphis.

Back in the days when the game was initially released, retrieving the cell id had been an undocumented feature. Meanwhile, the situation has changed and it’s possible to get the id through an official API. Unfortunately, accessing it requires Symbian Signed. So I decided to go through the Freeware Symbian Signed process.

Well, this was two months ago. If you go to the game website, you’ll see the game is still not released. This is not because the game has failed the tests. The reason is that I’m still waiting for the results.

I contacted the Symbian Signed-team twice. They told me that they can’t do much as the whole process is in the hands of Cellmania. So I decided to contact Cellmania, but never got a response…

Improvements

I think that it’s great that there is an opportunity to get freeware applications signed for free. However, in my opinion there are a number of things that have to be improved (well, in case this has not already happened lately):

1. Improve the test criteria: It took me a very long time to go through the extensive test criteria document.  Especially time-consuming was the privacy dialog at the beginning, as it required a new .ini-file, a dialog, translated text, etc. It would be a lot easier if there was a reference implementation for something like that, along with the standard text translated to all major languages.
   
   To go even further, wouldn’t it be possible to make the criteria less strict for freeware applications, where some unpaid developer has to do everything himself? Are the privacy dialog, low memory startup, backup and restore, … really crucial to a small freeware app.?
   
   
2. Improve the test criteria, part II: Even more time consuming has been figuring out that the backup process can’t be tested with a developer certificate. Also the AppTest Lite-tool didn’t recognize the incoming call and failed this test (along with a few similar ones).
   
   I had to search the internet to find “solutions” for those two common problems. As everyone will experience them, issues like that should be highlighted in the test criteria, instead of letting developers test the backup process over and over and read long documents - until they finally decide to consult some developer forums and discover that everything was correct in the first place.
   
   
3. Improve the signing process: There should be immediate feedback that the application has been received and is starting to be processed. Then, there has to be a way to query the current status, along with a guaranteed maximum time, which should be shorter than two months :)

"The Journey" lets you walk around in your real surroundings.

For “The Journey”, the story is different. In total, I spent a week working on Symbian Signed (eating up the limited free time). While this isn’t very motivating, the fun is now really gone when I already have to wait more than two months to be finally be able to release the otherwise 110% finished application. I don’t think the quality improved so much that all this is justified.

Please don’t understand this article as a criticism to Symbian Signed in general or the team working on it at Symbian. They’re doing a great job and are quick and helpful with their responses. However, the good idea of the Freeware Symbian Signed process has to be taken further and improved in many areas.