Ok Microsoft, take my money
Well, I've renewed my annual Windows Phone development registration. Man that team has some real inability to make up its mind. Back in the early Windows Phone 7 days I signed up because Microsoft seemed to genuinely care both about its platform and its developers. A key part of this caring is early access to OS updates.
Yes, a lot of people will sign up for a dev account simply to get early access. And this is wrong. But not really. While I disagree with hiding early access behind a payment of some sort, early access is critical. Especially with a company rolling out updates so slowly. They really can't afford to let the OS get out into the wild and have people immediately finding bugs they missed. Ideally, they need a window of time where a reasonable sized subset of their users can take a stab at it and help them find bugs so that they can get fixes in before a final release is out the door.
That being said, early access is only one reason I got an account in the first place (well truthfully, there was no word of early access when I originally signed up). I like to write applications for fun. And I like to know that I'm also able to run those applications on a real device, not just an emulator. Lets face it, most of the cool things these devices do just aren't done well on an emulator such as leveraging cameras or location services. Even though early access hadn't been mentioned, it was something I was expecting, and when I got it, I allowed my dev registration to automatically (at $100 a year).
When they stopped giving early access to the OS (and even early access to emulators at one point) I went in and cancelled my registration. I don't now, nor ever have any real plans to publish an app. But I disagree with those tactics. Especially because certain companies were given access on a case by case basis. This disadvantaged smaller developers who may have been interested in publishing for an upcoming version of the OS. Giving that early access away to some developers selectively could mean the death of your application if one of those firms that had early access had a competing product. At launch of the new OS, your app would be necessarily weeks or even months behind in leveraging the new API's and features. And this was frankly something I can't support.
So, when I woke up this morning to information from a reliable source that Windows Phone 8 GDR3 would be available for early access again (and not just to paying devs, but also to people signed up for their free App Studio accounts) I went back and renewed my developer registration... for $20. It is both cheaper to renew now than it was when I cancelled AND they have added back the early OS access which their taking away drove me to cancel in the first place.
I could have tried going down the avenue of signing up for an App Studio account... but I want my money to speak for my preferences. I'm giving them a financial reason to continue supporting their dev community in this fashion.
Yes, a lot of people will sign up for a dev account simply to get early access. And this is wrong. But not really. While I disagree with hiding early access behind a payment of some sort, early access is critical. Especially with a company rolling out updates so slowly. They really can't afford to let the OS get out into the wild and have people immediately finding bugs they missed. Ideally, they need a window of time where a reasonable sized subset of their users can take a stab at it and help them find bugs so that they can get fixes in before a final release is out the door.
That being said, early access is only one reason I got an account in the first place (well truthfully, there was no word of early access when I originally signed up). I like to write applications for fun. And I like to know that I'm also able to run those applications on a real device, not just an emulator. Lets face it, most of the cool things these devices do just aren't done well on an emulator such as leveraging cameras or location services. Even though early access hadn't been mentioned, it was something I was expecting, and when I got it, I allowed my dev registration to automatically (at $100 a year).
When they stopped giving early access to the OS (and even early access to emulators at one point) I went in and cancelled my registration. I don't now, nor ever have any real plans to publish an app. But I disagree with those tactics. Especially because certain companies were given access on a case by case basis. This disadvantaged smaller developers who may have been interested in publishing for an upcoming version of the OS. Giving that early access away to some developers selectively could mean the death of your application if one of those firms that had early access had a competing product. At launch of the new OS, your app would be necessarily weeks or even months behind in leveraging the new API's and features. And this was frankly something I can't support.
So, when I woke up this morning to information from a reliable source that Windows Phone 8 GDR3 would be available for early access again (and not just to paying devs, but also to people signed up for their free App Studio accounts) I went back and renewed my developer registration... for $20. It is both cheaper to renew now than it was when I cancelled AND they have added back the early OS access which their taking away drove me to cancel in the first place.
I could have tried going down the avenue of signing up for an App Studio account... but I want my money to speak for my preferences. I'm giving them a financial reason to continue supporting their dev community in this fashion.
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