Yesterday Microsoft announced that they were lowering the spec requirements for Windows Phone, which in turn means app developers can develop for these lower powered devices. Now Microsoft has released an SDK update to help developers with their new apps.
This is what Microsoft said:
To help you test and fine-tune your applications for these new devices, we’re providing an update to the Windows Phone SDK. Today we’re releasing a technical preview of the SDK update that gives you access to the 256MB emulator to let you determine how your apps install and run on lower memory devices. This preview does not include a “go live” license so you can’t publish apps created with it. A final version of the SDK, complete with the go-live license, will be available next month.
In addition to the engineering work we’ve done in the OS to optimize for lower cost devices and the release of a new SDK with emulator, we have identified a small number (around 5%) of current applications that will not run properly on the new lower cost devices. We’re contacting the developers of these apps directly to advise them of steps they can take to make their app compatible with lower cost phones. In most cases the guidance is simply to use less memory.
Ultimately, whether your app should be available to these phones or not is your call. We’ve enabled you to update the app manifest file in order to state whether your app does or does not work on lower memory devices. We’ll honor whatever value you choose. If you say no, your app will not be installable on these phones. Those we’ve automatically opted out already have this value set appropriately. If you disagree with us or alter your app to perform adequately on these devices, you can change the value in your application’s manifest file and resubmit your app. Details on this process will be available on App Hub.
You may wonder how we identified the apps that were opted out. First, we reviewed anonymous data provided by actual users who opted-in to the feedback mechanism on their phones. These data told us (anonymously!) how much memory each app consumes in real-world use. If we found that in more than 3% of cases an app uses more memory than we provide with the new paging mechanism, we opted it out automatically and began the process of engaging the developer directly. We combined this programmatic approach with a comprehensive, hands-on assessment of the most popular applications in Marketplace and tuned our paging algorithm.
So are you going to develop an app? If so, let us know!
