by brad
9. September 2010 06:00
Today’s Windows Phone 7 Development Tip comes from the official Windows Phone 7 Application Certification Requirements. If you are planning on having an application ready to go in October when the Marketplace opens, then you should definitely be familiar with all of the application policies.
Your application must render its first screen within 5 seconds of being launched. Granted, this will be very difficult to measure if you don’t have a device. If you don’t have a device (like me!) then you should be looking to make sure that number is nowhere near 5 seconds on the emulator just in case things run slower on the actual devices.
Splash screens can be used of course, but they do not count as the “first screen” of your application. If using a splash screen, the application must still render that first non-splash screen screen within 5 seconds. The official recommendation from Microsoft is that splash screens should be used for apps that have a start time of 1 second or greater.
Even though the application has to show something within 5 seconds, it doesn’t have to respond to user input for 20 seconds. So to sum up, the first screen has to show within 5 seconds and be usable within 20 seconds. That being said, 20 seconds is an eternity to make someone wait for a mobile application to be usable. I would shoot on having the app loaded and ready to go well within that 5 second window.
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