Harri Salminen's Forum Nokia Blog

Future changes in Symbian Signed -process

2007-09-10T22:37:58+03:00

Take a look at this post at Symbian's developer forum and especially the chapter describing new "Express signing" process. This looks like an improvement that at least I have been waiting for - it is a cheaper way to get applications signed and what's often more important, you will get the application signed immediately. Waiting for a week to get an application signed after a minor change has been something that I have felt quite difficult to explain to our customers.

This new signing process is expected to be available in Q4 and if you have any comments, now it is time to be active and provide constructive feedback to Symbian people.

Prompt user at uninstall, ok or not?

2007-02-14T09:04:00+02:00

We have successfully got an application Symbian Signed and we had to to make a minor change to the application (add one setting field, to be exact). OK, no problem. We change the application, prepare it for Symbian Signing, get the quotations and select the test house. Because application was already signed by another test house, I really wasn't expecting any problems. But...

Application was rejected because of a fatal problem, said the test report, application cannot be uninstalled. This was because our application has a couple of background servers running all the time. When such an application is to be uninstalled, terminal application manager will prompt user for closing down the background servers. User selects yes, servers are closed and all files are removed. However, the test house was feeling that this is not according to the test specification and they decided to reject the application. No matter how hard I try to read the test case PKG-04 I can't see where it is said that users must not be prompted during uninstall. A quick search to Forum Nokia discussion board shows that we are not alone with this problem, please see this thread. Yes, surely it would be possible to add "close down all the background servers" feature to our application but what's the point? The organizations that decide to use our solution want applications to be running all the time at the background and test criteria doesn't force us to add the unnecessary feature either.

I feel the test plan must be clarified regarding uninstallation. Can users be prompted during uninstall or not? Now that is not explicitly stated and test houses interpret the test plans differently.

So, how did the story end? I submitted the unchanged application to the test house we used for first signing, got package signed and customer installations have begun.

Improvement suggestions for Symbian Signed site

2007-01-29T13:45:15+02:00

After working some time with Symbian application signing, I have small suggestions how to make developer's life a little bit easier:

Publish test criteria in structured format
Now the test criteria can be downloaded as a pdf-file only. Why not publish the test criteria also in some structured format, such as xml? That would let the developers to import the current test criteria to their in-house test system, thus removing the need to copy-paste the test cases from pdf-document to test systems.

Allow users to save application templates to website
Submitting an application requires lots of information to be typed in. Some personal and company information comes from user's profile, but application data must be written every time from scratch. Especially filling the declarative statement every time is frustrating - even copying text from older submissions seems to be somehow denied, text is blurred and cannot be copied. What I'd like to see is a template that I fill once and later when I submit the same (customer branded) application again, I can just select the template and get declarative statement automatically filled.

Where is the test house?
Now Symbian signed website has three test houses to choose from, but I hope that someday there will be more. Please indicate clearly where the test house is, because selecting a test house from a different continent an slow down the process, as described in this blog entry's comment.

I've heard there is a new firmware available...

2006-11-07T16:24:49+02:00

It was one morning last week when we got a report about new firmware version for Communicator devices. That's always a serious situation, because we have learned that new firmware versions sometimes cause interoperability problems. A typical customer installation can contain applications from different software vendors, security applications, encrypted disks, customer specific settings etc. Some change in terminal firmware can cause problems for the whole installed system.

When we were getting our test devices flashed, I started (once again) to hope that we could get an alert about new firmware releases. Currently we get the information quite randomly: for example customer reports a problem or asks if there are any "known issues" related to some version. Then we try to get one device flashed and verified. If we could get an alert about a new firmware release, we could test the systems before customers get the firmware and fix the possible problems. I'd be happy if I just got a message telling that new firmware is out there.

This time the story has a happy ending: everything worked like a charm after firmware upgrade.

How to become a Phone Sniper?

2006-11-02T23:15:49+02:00

I assume anybody who has released an application for mobile devices will agree – testing every aspect of the application is a nightmare. Testing as such is a difficult and time-consuming task, but testing mobile devices adds extra difficulty: the variety of devices and different firmware versions. Where to get all the devices? How to get the devices flashed with different firmware versions? How to even know which firmware versions exist!

Funambol, the company hosting the famous open-source synchronization engine, has solved the testing problem by activating the whole developer community to test the application in their Phone Sniper program – and to get paid for it. From their website you can check the list of terminals that so far haven't been certified with their latest released software. If you find your phone from the list of uncertified devices, register yourself to Funambol, run the tests, submit results to them and receive the reward. More information can be found from Funambol's website.

I think the test result submission page is still missing two important details:

the phone firmware version
the SyncML protocol version used, for example S60 3rd edition devices support both 1.1 and 1.2 protocol versions