Publishing to the Ovi Store
Posted 22 Aug 2009 by Akinwale Ariwodola
SimpleIRC just passed the Ovi QA approval process yesterday which means it should be appearing in the store for select Nokia devices within the next few days. After reading various blog and forum posts debating and contradicting various points on the requirements of publishing to the Ovi Store, I decided to dive in and give it a shot. Here be the details of my voyage. It's rather lengthy, so prepare yourself.It all started on the 10th of July. At first, I didn't realise only registered companies were allowed to join but thankfully, I had already handled that a couple of months prior to my sign up date. Pretty amusing considering I had been procrastinating for a long time about registering a company. To sign up as a publisher, you are required to pay €50 ($72.30 when I signed up) at the time of registration. The next day, I got an email requesting additional information concerning my company registration because they couldn't validate it. I was given two business days to provide documentation that shows my business ID and had to answer a few other questions. I was pretty impressed by this thinking, "Oh, hey, these guys are pretty fast in responding, this might actually turn out to be a better experience than dealing with Apple" but I was so very wrong.
I sent over the requested information the following Monday but I didn't hear from them regarding this until the 28th of July. Meanwhile, I had to procure a code-signing certificate for the application. Before I get into that, here was the general gist I was able to gather regarding the requirements of submitting applications to Ovi:
- You need a Publisher ID from TrustCenter for Java, Symbian or Flash Lite apps which costs $200 a year
- For Java applications, you need to submit your application to the Java Verified program for testing through test houses (companies that run a series of tests on your application) and signing. The pricing information I could find (the other test houses require you to contact them) places it at about $250 per application per device.
- For Symbian applications, you need to submit your application to the Symbian Signed program for testing and signing. They also make use of test houses and the lowest cost option I could find was this guys which places testing fees at €185 (~$277.50) for a first submission and €40 (~$60) for signing.
Now, obviously, I found these options quite expensive and it was all going to take a lot of time so I had to do some more digging. I eventually found out that the lesser known option which also appears to be the quickest (at least for Java applications) is to simply obtain a code-signing certificate to sign your application. I would assume that it's also possible to use code-signing certificates for Symbian and Flash Lite applications but I am not entirely sure. In any case, there were two certificate authorities widely recognised across a wide range of Nokia devices which are Verisign and Thawte. If there's anything I know Verisign for, it's for being we'd-like-to-make-you-bankrupt expensive, and as expected, they lived up to their name with the pricing of their code-signing certificates - $499, $895 and $1295 for the one-, two- and three-year validity options respectively so I decided to go with Thawte. They offer their certificates at $299 for the one-year and $549 for the two-year validity options.
But I'm all about low prices, especially when you consider the current economic state of everything! Interestingly, I had researched code-signing late last year when I was working on an Adobe AIR application for Presently. Remember Tucows from the early days of the Internet? It was one of the go-to sites for shareware and freeware downloads back in the day. Good times. I was trying to find low-priced (I refuse to use the word, "cheap" in this write-up) code-signing certificates and found a forum post which pointed to the Tucows Author Resource Center where you could get Thawte certificates at $160 and $300 for the one-year and two-year options respectively. I bookmarked this and it proved useful. They also offer Comodo certificates at $75, $140 and $195 for the one-, two- and three-year options for those who are interested. The catch? You only need to register as an author and that's free.
I promptly purchased the $160 Thawte certificate (also on the 10th of July) and proceeded to deal with Thawte. You have to generate public/private key pairs and a certificate signing request (CSR) which you have to submit when filling in the application form. When generating the CSR, you need to use a domain name as the Comman Name (CN). Another thing you should also keep in mind is that they only accept applications from registered companies. I decided to do quite a bit of follow-up everyday from the following Monday since I heard certificate applications could take time. They required me to provide proof of registration of my business (which I already had available thanks to the folks at Ovi asking me to provide this) and proof of ownership of the domain (for this, the domain registrant details have to match the name and address of your company/business). Thanks to me constantly being on their necks by logging on to live chat every morning, the certificate was issued by Wednesday, the 15th of July. I got my application signed and I was finally ready to submit to Ovi for publishing!
Meanwhile, I was still waiting for word about whether or not my business was validated. I was given two business days as the deadline after which my account would've been terminated and my credit card charge refunded. Two business days passed and nothing happened. I decided to submit my application after signing it with my shiny new code-signing ceritifcate. As stated earlier, I eventually got an email on the 28th of July that my business was approved to start publishing on the 15th. Very efficient. Which made me realise that these guys were just going to be as slow as Apple in responding to requests. I had read horror stories on the Forum Nokia boards, but I hoped that was just due to the initial wave - lots of applications to review for the Ovi Store launch and such - and things had improved. In any case, I didn't see any activity for days and was starting to wonder if Finland's national holiday had anything to do with it.
I jumped when I eventually got the first email from the QA department on the 10th of August. The application failed QA for the E71 due to the version number shown in the About dialog differing from what was in the JAD file. I found this weird considering that I was using getAppProperty("MIDlet-Version") to obtain the version number and it worked fine on the devices I tested with. I simply decided to hard code the version number into the About dialog box and resubmit. It was a quick fix which I didn't have to test. I wanted my application published as quickly as possible. Sue me.
The 16th of August, 6 days later, I got another email from QA stating that the application failed QA again due to the fact that it was unsigned. Curious. I had confirmed that it was signed before I submitted and so I contacted the support department stating my case. I also rebuilt and re-uploaded the JAD/JAR files making sure they were code-signed. 5 days later, success! I had finally reached the end of my journey. SimpleIRC passed the QA process and it will be published to the store. It took all of 30 days from the day I submitted. What an experience! They also say it typically takes a week for this to happen, so we'll see how it goes.
I hereby present to you the easiest and cost-effective process of publishing to the Ovi Store. Here are the minimum requirements:
- A registered business/company (I'm sure you can find out from local authorities how to go about this)
- ~$75 (€50) publisher fee for Ovi registration
- $160 for a Thawte code-signing certificate
- Lots of patience
I spent a total of about $235 ($75 Ovi publisher fee + $160 1-year Thawte code-signing certificate) as opposed to $525 ($75 Ovi publisher fee + $200 Publisher ID + $250 Java Verified fees) or if you decided to go the Symbian route, $612.50 ($75 Ovi publisher fee + $200 Publisher ID + $277.50 testing fees + $60 signing). Also keep in mind that you may have to pay more depending on the number of devices you intend to test for. Additionally, I can use my code-signing certificate for every Java application I develop, instead of having to pay $250 to test on a per application per device basis. I haven't done more research on this but I'd guess they've also got bulk pricing as well.
In comparison, publishing to the iPhone App Store costs only $99, and it's open to both individuals and business entities. I also did a bit of research of publishing to the Microsoft Marketplace and calculated the initial cost of entry to be around ~$900-$1200 (thanks to a combination of our beloved Verisign and test houses). I may go into more details about this in a later post if I get around to it. One thing that Apple and Nokia really need to address however, is the response time to support requests and the time-to-publish. No experience with Microsoft yet, so I can't comment on that. Ultimately, though, it's been an interesting experience and I'd have to say publishing to the iPhone App Store appears to be the cheapest (well, it's true if you are already running OS X one way or the other) and easiest option so far.
I hope this clears up some confusion surrounding Ovi Store publishing and I suppose it's safe to say this can be considered a fairly definitive guide. Good luck!
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