We’re pleased to start off the New Year with an update to App Hub that will enable you to distribute apps and games to even more customers in more markets. App Hub now allows you to submit apps for distribution in 6 new markets; Argentina, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Peru and the Philippines. Although you will be able to now select these markets for distribution in App Hub, the Windows Phone Marketplace is not yet available to customers in these markets. We will provide more information about availability of the Marketplace for customers in these markets in a future post.
You should be aware that applications submitted to three of these six new markets – China, Indonesia and Malaysia – will be subject to additional requirements due to local laws, regulations or norms. You can find information on these additional requirements in the Application Certification Requirements.
Given the Marketplace is not yet available for customers in these markets and the addition of new requirements, we’re opening the submission process early to give those of you interested in distribution to these markets a head start on certification. We’re viewing this as an early access period and you can expect the certification process to take a little longer during this time period.
As usual, when submitting either an update or a new application in App Hub, you can choose to publish the app “worldwide” to the full set of 41 markets to you can select specific markets. When you select worldwide, the additional requirements of the new markets apply. As a result, if your application fails certification, you will need to either update and resubmit your app to meet all worldwide requirements, or de-select the markets where your application will not meet requirements.
Also included in this release are a number of minor enhancements and bug fixes, including improvements that will streamline the payout process and enhance reporting to provide data like crash counts and exceptions to assist in improving your apps. These are a result of your feedback and we’ll continue to provide other improvements in each release.
We’re pleased to start the New Year off by expanding markets to which you can submit apps for distribution, and will provide more information on the consumer experiences for those markets when we are ready to go live.