In several blog post over the past several weeks I talked about an application I had written that I was going to use as an example of something that passed certification. Some one from MSMobiles.com had asked me if I had any applications in the Marketplace and I told him about the application, that it had passed certification, and that I only needed to make it visible so that people could download it for free. I was immediatly advised to put a price on it instead of giving it away for free. While I find the program to be useful for myself I didn't think that any one else would find it to be useful beyond being a code example. So to prove him wrong I set the price at 0.99 USD (and 0.69 GBP, 1.39 AUD) which was the lowest available price and made the application visible.
Looking at the sales of the application over a weeks time I have to say I was surprised. Its sales have been much higher than I thought. In a week's time I've recovered most of the 99 USD that I had to pay to register for the Windows Marketplace for Mobile. But this has impact on my plans to release the code as an example. If I make the application free now then I'll be potentially provoking all of those that have paid money for it. I don't want to punish the early adopters So I've had to come up with another solution that will allow me to release the code without offending those that have already purchased it. I'm making some updates to the application that will make some new features available to it along with improving the UI. Once the update is on the Marketplace I'll make the previous version of the code available.
I've got some ideas for what new features could be added to the application to make it useful. While I'm at it I'll see if I can get the application translated into German (I might be able to make another post on localization and regionalization from that)
Tags: Windows Mobile