App hub refresh: new look and feel, reports, private beta publishing

Microsoft has refreshed the look and feel for the App Hub website. The new features are: at-a-glance reports of all your apps, a new, cleaner status board for apps in submission, the ability to see how many times your app has crashed recently and the biggest feature of them all: publishing apps as private beta apps to people of your choice. Developers are required to agree to a newer terms of service before entering the site.

 

 

Beta publishing:

Let us take a look at the private beta publishing first, since it is the most interesting of them. You start by creating a new submission, and on the very first page, you are given an option of distributing it to a private audience. The FAQ page for beta testing currently just redirects to the app hub submission walkthrough page. You can have up to 100 users, and they will have 90 days to beta test your application. The beta app does not go through marketplace testing, so this should let quickly iterating through bugfixes. The final step in the submission process states that “After the beta test is complete, you can update your XAP with any bug fixes and submit it for another private beta test.” We are not clear if this means it can be updated on the tester’s phones via the normal marketplace update route. The beta test lasts 90 days.

Image courtesy @longzheng, source.

Dashboard:

The dashboard, as shown in the first screenshot here, now shows your most recent payouts, summaries of downloads of the past 30 days, summaries of app crashes in the past 30 days, and a new report (consolidated daily and cumulative downloads of your apps):

Cleaner submission status, reviews by geography:

One of the major confusions faced by new developers was the meaning of the various statuses. While “Submission in Progress” meant there was still some buttons left to click for the developer, “Testing in Progress” meant that the submission was complete and the ball was in Microsoft’s court. This confusion will probably now be a thing of the past courtesy the new status page in App Hub:

Also new on that page: you can look at your reviews from specific geographic locations, and the average rating from that location. You can also edit the details and the pricing. A point to note: editing the details will reset the status of the submission (like in the screenshot above).

New deep links:

The URL to the deep links seems to be changing.. from social.zune.net/redirect?id=<guid> to windowsphone.net/s?appid=<guid> – although this is shown on the app hub, the actual link does not seem to be working.

New looks for graphs:

The actual functionality of the reports and graphs has not changed, but they sport a new look.

(via @longzheng and @chrishwalsie)

By Sushovan De