Microsoft adds new features to Windows Phone Dev Center to ease app submissions

Things are about to get slightly smoother for you if you’re a Windows Phone app developer. Microsoft has announced three important changes to the app submission process for Windows Phone.

On the Windows Phone Developer Blog, Microsoft detailed three new features, including the ability to cancel app submissions and support better image uploads. Rushmi Malaviarachchi, Lead Program Manager – Windows Phone Dev Center, wrote in the blog that these changes were made after the engineering team mulled over feedback sent in to them by developers.

First up, Microsoft has introduced a much needed feature that is sure to make app developers heave a sigh of relief – cancelling submission. Before this update, if you were in the process of submitting an app and realised you needed to make some last minute changes, you had to wait till the Dev Center had finished processing it. This was a cause of frustration for many developers and the submission cancellation feature was the most sought after one in the Dev Center’s UserVoice forum.

Cancel and edit submissions easily now

Now you can simply cancel an app submission from the lifecycle page. Once you’ve cancelled the submission, you will be offered an “Edit Submission” option, using which you can simply make that last minute tweak or fix that final bug. Once you are done with the changes, you can submit it again.

Microsoft has also introduced a small but helpful option using which developers can rotate their app screenshots from landscape to portrait mode and vice-versa. “This may not be such a big deal when viewed on the phone, but it certainly makes a difference when customers browse apps on the web Store,” writes Malaviarachchi. Instead of going through a tedious process of fixing these images using an image editor, you will now be able to rotate it with the click of a button within the Dev Center itself.

Lastly, if you’re a developer whose app supports multiple screen resolutions, you can choose to upload only screenshots with the highest resolution. A new feature called Automatic screenshot resizing will do the rest of the work for you. It will create screenshots for all the other lower resolutions. Of course, the Dev Center still provides for flexibility to submit a set of screenshots per supported resolution.

Windows Phone has always struggled when it comes to the app department. Lauded for its impressive user interface by critics and ignored by users for its lack of apps is something that hit Microsoft. But ever since the launch of Windows Phone 8, things are looking up for Microsoft. The platform now boasts of 130,000 apps up and growing fast.

Microsoft is also aiming to unify its Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 platforms for apps by getting developers to maximize  the amount of code you reuse when building apps for both platforms. A great move by Microsoft, it will serve as a win-win for both, the developers and Microsoft who will have double the amount of apps on both its platforms.