Microsoft updates application certification requirement for Windows Phone marketplace

In a blog post, Microsoft have released an update to the policies regarding the application certification requirement required for submitting applications to the marketplace. Developers, take note.

More from the official blog post,

• First, we’ve updated and clarified our content policies and technical requirements to address some of the common questions and points of confusion that we have heard from several developers. These requirement changes will go into effect on June 3 for new applications and application updates.
• Second, we have added several test steps to the technical certification requirements to help developers conduct in-house application testing during the development cycle, in order to avoid common certification pitfalls and to improve pass rates and certification times.
• Finally, the application certification requirements for Windows Phone have now been integrated into our MSDN developer documentation. You can find the updated certification requirements here.

Now there have been addition to existing policies, a complete new policy and the usual expected modifications, here is a bit of an overview from Arktonic 

2.14  Your application must have distinct, substantial and legitimate content and purpose other than merely launching a webpage.This is a new requirement. It appears to be aimed at apps that are simple WebBrowser containers pointing to a publicly available site. Pretty self-explanatory.
3.7 (part)  Applications that enable legal gambling in the applicable jurisdiction where legal gambling is allowed may be permitted, subject to the Application Provider's acceptance of additional contract terms.This is an addition to the illegal gambling clause to clarify that legal gambling is generally not an issue.
4.7  Application Tile ImageThis section seems to have been added for the singular purpose of telling developers to make their small and large app tiles actually have someting to do with their apps. Seems kind of obvious to me, but I suppose this rule wouldn't have been made had someone not tried to violate it.
5.1.3  Application Responsiveness: If an application performs an operation that causes the device to appear to be unresponsive for more than three seconds, such as downloading data over a network connection, the application must display a visual progress or busy indicator.This was changed from the previous "5.1.3  Application Does not Hang". It now has a well-defined limit of three seconds maximum before an app is required to display some kind of "busy" indicator. This makes sense from a UX perspective, although the only real difference between the two versions is the explicit 3 second rule, so it's not thatdifferent.
5.2.3  (missing?)Um, yeah, I have a feeling Microsoft will fix this little omission.
6.5.4  The SoundEffect class must not be used to play a continuous background music track in an application.This was changed from a "should" in a note to a separate "must" clause. MediaPlayer is for music, and SoundEffect is for, well, sound effects.

 Do let us know your thoughts on this. 

By Rahul Mathur