As an Assistant Professor, I'm teaching Symbian OS at the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg, Austria. My company "Mopius" is developing mobile software with a special focus on Symbian OS.
Freeware Symbian Signed: 2 Months+?
mopius | 18 April, 2007 22:48
Currently, I’m trying to release the S60 v3-port of the location based freeware game called “The Journey”. It uses the cell ids of the mobile phone network to determine the relative movement of the player, and connects this real-world information to the virtual gaming world of a small detective story.
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):
- 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.? - 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. - 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 :)
Summary
Developing mobile applications can be fun – as some of you might remember, I recently released HourPower, which was developed in just one day and was released the next, as it didn’t require Symbian Signed. Up to now, it has already been downloaded more than 1000 times, with many positive comments and not a single complaint. As I said, it's fun.
"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.
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Re: Freeware Symbian Signed: 2 Months+?
mopius | 19/04/2007, 00:04
Thanks for the link! It's great - well, not great, but interesting - to know that others have the same problems with Symbian Signed. The suggestions you made are very thoughtful and true and would certainly make everything a lot easier!I guess the best thing would be if someone from Symbian / Nokia / UIQ officially collects all those suggestions from your article, this one and the others that may exist. Then, every single one should be rated according to the real-world practibility. And finally, the best ones have to be put into practice.
About distributing the game unsigned: It's not what I'd like to do. The point of the game is that it's simple to use and that it provides location based gameplay without complicated or expensive equipment / setup. If the user would have to sign the downloaded game himself, this would ruin the whole experience. It's true that it's better than nothing, but I fear it's far too complicated for the average user. Well, at least I wouldn't do it if I put myself in the role of a potential user :) But I'll certainly release it that way it if nothing changes anytime soon...
Re: Freeware Symbian Signed: 2 Months+?
ptrmn | 20/04/2007, 14:03
Re: Freeware Symbian Signed: 2 Months+?
coultonp | 19/04/2007, 10:53
AndreasFirst of all nice to see you have done an update of the journey and I will be interested in trying it so I hope you get your problems resolved soon . Speaking as an academic who likes to test applications in the real world I also have issues about the v9 signing regime which IMHO does restrict my ability to perform this type of innovative research.
Re: Freeware Symbian Signed: 2 Months+?
mopius | 23/04/2007, 01:11
Great to hear that you're looking forward to the re-release of the game! While the game will still be a proof-of-concept project instead of a real game, it will look a lot better with the new graphics.And that's true, applications like that are the typical academic research project ("The Journey" was originally also developed for my Bachelor's Thesis). For this, certificates are making the life a lot more difficult...
This can even be said in a more general manner: an hour ago, I just wanted to download an official skin for the OggPlay-application. It didn't install as the certificate was already expired. Well, I don't really see the reason. Is there any advantage for the users, the operators or developers if the certificates expire after half a year? It just makes everyone annoyed. I guess there are a lot of things that might have their reasons, but those are not really obvious to the standard user or developer...
Who am I?
Thinking about what mobile phones can do except messaging and voice calls is one of my main interests. At the department of Mobile Computing at the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg (Austria), I can work on those ideas every day by collaborating with students, researching and - well - thinking.
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Re: Freeware Symbian Signed: 2 Months+?
antonypr | 18/04/2007, 23:39
One more thing, if you want, you can distribute your game unsigned. Then ask your users to sign it themselves. It is a bit of work for the end users, but it's better than waiting for Symbian Signed and you have nothing.
There have been some freeware developers do it this way, including myself. You can check it out at http://mobile.antonypranata.com/2007/03/18/why-do-we-need-symbian-signed/.