Upcoming Changes in Symbian Signed

[Nokia Ron]

Symbian Signed is an industry supported application testing and certification program for native Symbian applications. Join us to the webinar to hear about the latest changes coming to the Symbian Signed process. There will be two webinars be sure to sign up quickly. These Symbian Signed webinars are open to everyone.

Session 1:
London 10:00, Helsinki 12:00, Beijing 17:00
https://mktools.forum.nokia.com/invi...assword= ssuc1


Session 2:
London 16:30, Helsinki 18.30, New York 11:30
https://mktools.forum.nokia.com/invi...assword= ssuc2

[Paul.Todd]

This event is scheduled for October 25, 2007 as its not obvious in the post (you need to click on the link to get it)

[mitts]

Last week, at the SmartPhone show, Symbian took the veils of the new Symbian Signed program, Symbian Signed V3.

The new program will be rolled out in 4Q07. For a very good guide to the new program, check out: http://developer.symbian.com/main/le...ian_signed.pdf

This program has been designed to make a very significant improvement in the lives of Professional Symbian/S60 developers.

Some of the key improvements:

1) Developers told us that the main issue with the old program was the delay (and thus high hidden cost) incurred by 3rd party testing. In the new program, developers will be able to Express sign their applications - see restrictions on capabilities in the above .pdf -with "immediate" turn around thus removing the test delay. As we understand it, this should be the single biggest cost saings item of the new program. Also the price for each signing event will be much lower, of the order of 20€.

This all means that the Symbian community now puts new trust - that previously was obtained by "forcing" 3rd party testing - into the hands of the developer. So while Symbian improves the signing process, pls ensure that the QA and testing of your applications does meet high quality standards.

2) The second thing that developers told us was that the Symbian Signed Test criteria were not always very conducive to actually improving the quality of applications. While not out yet, Symbian Signed V3 will come with a totally reworked set of test criteria. Not only have the test criteria themselves been changed, also the way in which they are presented has been improved. To meet the new expectations raised in 1), you should now be able to much more easily incorporate the Symbian Signed test criteria directly as test cases into your overall QA process.

3) The third major feedback item we heard a lot about was that it was quite hard to obtain Manufacturer capabilities and that the more stringent testing related to Manufacturer capabilities further added to the overall bill of signing. While Forum Nokia and Symbian have already provided a much more streamlined process for obtaining Manufacturer capabilities and related developer certs, the final step is to define in the new process only TCB, AllFiles and DRM as Manufacturer capabilities, thus removing the other old Manu capabilities from the domain of special manufacturer testing.

And yes, we know, we did not offer a lot for freeware and open source developers yet. But we did not leave them totally unheard either.

There will be a new signing program called Open Sign. This will allow people to sign applications for 1 single IMEI, ie their own phone (or that is the main idea). This should help those open source and freeware developers who previously have relied on dev certs for distribution. While on the surface Open Signed is very much like dev cert signing for a single IMEI, the big change is the ease of use. As a user now can drop on unsigned app onto the Symbian Signed site and have it signed for his/her phone, without any need to setup and install Carbide, SDK or the like. This should provide many new developers the mechanism to distribute certain application categories to much broader audiences.