At the moment we have 3 apps pending in the Ovi store. During the submission process we gained some knowledge that might save you some time when you’re going through the same process. This blog post is meant as a survival guide, so I thought 28 days later was a fitting title, allthough our apps are still pending after 41 days. Here are the issues we ran into so far, and how to avoid them:
Issue #1 – Vendor vs Publisher
If you have developed an app for another company and now want to publish it through their publishing account, make sure the Vendor listed in the .sis file is the same as the Publisher name. Otherwise you’ll get an error. This is inspected manually by Ovi QA and took two weeks for them to report back. Here is the error message:
SUMMARY: The Vendor Name listed in your package file is “Cutehacks AS”
CORRECTIVE ACTION: The Vendor Name listed in your package file must match your publisher name “NRK”
There are two ways to resolve this. Either get the owner of the publisher account (the company you made it for) to tell Ovi in an email: “It’s OK – really. It’s fine!”. Or, fix the Vendor part in your .pkg script. Google it if you don’t know how.
Issue #2 – Countries vs Language
When submitting a .sis file you tell which languages it supports, and also which countries it should be published in. There is a correlation between these two, and if you haven’t guessed it right – your app will fail. To exemplify: If you put as countries: Worldwide, and languages: American English, Norwegian – it will fail. You are not allowed to publish an app worldwide if it’s only in American English and Norwegian. Here is the error we got:
SUMMARY: Localized content must be set to its localized region
ACTUAL RESULT: American English and Norwegian are the only supported language selected by the publisher however the content is selected to be distributed Neutral
EXPECTED RESULT: Only Canada, US or Finland, Norway, Sweden, Norway, Denmark regions can be selected in the country distribution if the content is localized in American English or Norwegian.
Now this check is also done manually, and it took them two weeks to report this back to us. In other words, there is an internal list inside Ovi of which languages must be supported to be able to distribute it to certain countries. This list is not documented anywhere as far as I know. Note they make a distinction between English and American English, and actually disallow the app to be distributed to the UK, Australia, India.
Issue #3 – Smart Installer warning notice
Since our apps are using Qt, which on older phones are not yet included, they may in some cases require a download of up to 13 megs. If you don’t put a warning at the top of your app description that states this, they will fail your Qt based app. Here is the error:
ISSUE: Description for Qt Smart Installer content requires additional information
SUMMARY: Items utilizing the Qt SmartInstaller requires an additional disclaimer in the description
CORRECTIVE ACTIONS: Please add the disclaimer below to the beginning of the metadata description informing users that additional downloads may be required
Now to be fair, in two out of three cases the QA guys just added the warning note for us and we didn’t get an error – but in one case the app was simply just failed. This also took them about two weeks to notice and must also have been checked manually. The warning notice needs to read: *This item may require a one-time download of components as large as 13 MB. Use of WLAN is recommended. It needs to be translated to all the languages you support as well.
Summary and conclusion
We submitted 3 apps 41 days ago. They are all still pending:
- Two are still pending for Symbian^3 phones: Reason unknown
- One is still pending for Symbian^1 and Symbian^3: Reason unknown
- Note that no actual software bugs have been reported yet for any of the apps
All reported issues so far have been fixed within hours and then resubmitted to Ovi.
