Publishing Windows Phone Applications on Windows Phone Store

Publishing Windows Phone Applications on Windows Phone Store

Publishing your Windows Phone apps in the Windows Phone Store helps in distributing the apps to a large number of app lovers. It helps you to get the crash reports easily. Currently, there are two Windows markets, namely Windows Store (to submit and publish Windows 8 apps) and Windows Phone Store (to submit and publish Windows Phone apps). A main criterion to upload your Windows Phone app to an App Store is to have a Windows Developer Account and pay the fee to get a developer account. This could be done by signing up for a Windows Developer Account.

Windows Store Apps can be published in Windows Store and Windows Phone Apps can be published in Windows Phone Store. Prior to uploading your Windows Phone app to the Windows Phone Store, run the Windows App Certification on the application that you developed. In this document, I have taken a Windows Phone 8.1 application to the packaging, uploading and then publishiing of it to the Windows Phone Store. The procedure for uploading and publishing your Windows Phone 8.1 application is given below.

1. Log on to Dev Center and click on the sign in button present on the right side corner as shown below.
   
   
   
   
2. Sign in with the registered Windows Developer Account credentials.
   
   
   
   
3. Signing in results in proceeding to your Windows Developer Account main page.
   
   
   
   The preceding screen shows my Windows Developer Account main page. You can observe that my e-mail id is specified at the top right corner of the page.
   
   
4. Click on the Dashboard option present at the top-left side of the Windows Developer Account main page.
   
   
   
   
5. Click on the Windows Phone Store option.
   
   
   
   The Windows Store option will proceed to a page wherein we can upload and publish our Windows 8 or Windows Store apps. Whereas clicking on Windows Phone Store will take you to Windows Phone Store page. Once you go to the Windows Phone page, click on the Dashboard option to go to your Windows Phone publishing dashboard.
   
   
6. Windows Phone publishing dashboard.
   
   
   
   The preceding screen shows the Windows Phone dashboard. All are submitted or under submission Windows Phone apps that will settle up here in the dashboard. You can view the progress of a submission in this dashboard. Dashboard helps you to track the app submission. We need to click on the “Submit App” button to submit a new Windows Phone application to the Windows Phone Store.
   
   
7. Submit a new Windows Phone application to the Windows Phone Store.
   
   
   
   Once you click on the “Submit App” option, you will see a detailed page for submitting your Windows Phone application.
   
   
   
   Click on the “App Info” option to submit the details of your Windows Phone app.
   
   
8. Provide the application information.
   
   
   
   Application information includes app name, app category, app subcategory, app price and distribution channels. In this example submission, I have an OCR Demo Windows Phone application to submit to the Windows Phone Store. In this example, the app name is “OCR Demo” and the category is “Social”.
   
   
   
   Here, I have selected the “Beta” option for distribution of the application. Beta helps to distribute the app to people for testing the application. In Beta testing there is a limit of 10,000 people to send the app to and a maximum of 10,000 people to download and test the app. The option Public Store should be ticketed if you would like to publish the application directly in the store so that people can search and download your app directly from the Windows Phone Store.
   
   
9. Enter the e-mail ids to get notified for Beta testing.
   
   
   
   Enter the Microsoft account email-ids of participants who are involved in beta testing of the app one by one separated by a semi-colon. These participants would be notified of the Beta testing of the application.
   
   
10. Save and return to the Submit App page.
    
    
    
    Once you click on the “Save” option present in the previous step's screen, you will be taken back to the “Submit app” page so you can continue with uploading and describing your Windows Phone package. Now, click on the second option on the “Submit app” page, in other words “Upload and describe your package(s)”.
    
    
11. Create Windows Phone app packages.
    
    
    
    Right-click on the Windows Phone project and click on the Store option and select the Create App Packages option. Create the Windows Phone App package in the similar way that we create Windows Store App package explained in the article: Creating and Installing Windows Store App Packages. Once you create the Windows Phone 8.1 package successfully, you will get the bundled .appxupload file as a token of the final output of the package. The procedure for creating the package include Building the package, selecting the CPU architecture and completion of the package creation.
    
    In the initial building of the package step itself, there is an option to build the package to upload directly to the store, but at this point of time, I am only demonstrating the uploading of the application to the store without selecting that option. So, when creating the package, your answer to the question “Do you want to build packages to upload to the Windows Store?” will be to check the second option, in other words “No”.
    
    
    
    Once you complete creating the Windows Phone package you will be taken to the path where the package is to be created. In this example, I have taken the Windows Phone 8.1 application and the final output of the package creation here will be .appxupload file. The preceding screen conveys to you with results of package creation. This is the file that we need to upload to the Windows Phone Store manually with respect to the procedure present in this article.
    
    
12. Associate the Windows Phone app with the store.
    
    
    
    Right-click on the Windows Phone project and click on the store and select Associate App with the Store option. This helps you to associate your app directly to the store. Then you will be taken to the Associate Your App with the Windows Phone Store window.
    
    
    
    Once you are on Associate Your App with the Windows Phone Store window, click on the “Next” option to proceed to Sign in to the Windows Phone Store screen.
    
    
    
    Now enter the Microsoft e-mail id and password of your Windows Phone Store account and click on Sign in to sign in with the entered Microsoft Developer Account credentials. Once you sign in the app will be automatically associated to the Windows Phone Store. Thereafter, Visual Studio automatically assigns required accurate values to the Package Display Name, Package Name, Publisher ID and Publisher Display Name options to the values present in local app manifest present in your Windows Phone project.
    
    
    
    As shown in the preceding screen under the Windows Phone project, clicking on the Package.appxmanifest file opens up the manifest designer. It also has an XML file associated with it but the alternate option of updating it in the manifest designer is easy and in turn it generates and updates XAML version of the manifest file as well. This app manifest file (Package.appxmanifest) contains all the necessary properties and settings required when submitting your Windows Phone App to the Windows Phone Store. Check for the updated app setting through the app manifest designer.
    
    
    
    The preceding screen shows the app settings present in package.appxmanifest through the manifest designer.
    
    
13. Return to the Windows Phone Store dashboard to upload the package.
    
    
    
    Click on the Upload and describe your package(s), in other words the second option present in the Windows Phone Store dashboard to complete the submission. Once you click on this option you will be taken to the next page shown below.
    
    
    
    As shown in the preceding screen, click on the “Add new” option to describe your app and to upload the final .appxupload file.
    
    
14. Describe the package's info in the store.
    
    
    
    Provide the necessary information to describe your app package. The information includes selection of a suitable language, provision for describing your app to the store and so on.
    
    
    
    Uploading the images is one amongst a few important tasks that you need to complete. First, upload the 300×300 pixels image for the App title icon. You can use Microsoft Paint to make specific resolution images to upload since the store will not accept images with a resolution other than pixels as shown in the preceding screenshot.
    
    
    
    As shown in the preceding screen, you need to upload the screenshots to showcase your app. The screenshot image of the app should be 768×1280 pixels. It should be uploaded and saved. Press on the “Save” button to save all the data that you entered directly onto the Windows Phone Store.
    
    
    
    Select the package that you have created from your computer disk and upload the .appxupload file to the Store. The preceding screen shows the .appxupload package file present on my disk. It is created after the packaging process of the Windows Phone 8.1 application. Once you save, you will be taken to the screen given below.
    
    
    
    Now click on the “Review and Submit” option.
    
    
    
    After you submit the application also, you can Replace or Delete the existing uploaded package as you see the options in the preceding screen.
    
    
    
    Click on the “Replace” option to replace the package with the new package of your Windows Phone application. Click on the “Delete” option to delete the existing package.
    
    
15. Publish the application.
    
    
    Once the publishing of the application is completed, you will see the published application in the list of applications published. Here in my case, I have published the OCR Demo application and its package is listed under the “Published” category. Once the review is over, then only the app will be published and will be listed under the “Published” category. There are options to update an app and Delete an app. The update app option is meant for updating the existing app. The delete app option is for deleting the application from the Windows Phone Store.
    
    Once it is published under Beta testing, an automated notification will be sent to the e-mail ids that we listed when submitting the app under Beta testing. Another option to consider is to upload the app to the public store directly. Then, it will be visible to a large number of Windows Phone app explorers for the payment and download of your application.