Build a Windows Mobile app, win a Surface

By Jessica Dolcourt on 28 July 2009, 11:58am

At long last, Microsoft is publicly getting its Windows Mobile Marketplace app store under way. On Monday, the software behemoth opened the door to submissions from developers in 29 countries. To sweeten the deal and drum up excitement, Microsoft has also announced the Race to Market Challenge, a contest of superlatives that will end with Redmond doling out four touchscreen Microsoft Surface tables to four winning developers.

All applications, games and widgets certified in the Windows Marketplace for Mobile before 31 December will be eligible to win one of four categories: most downloaded freeware, most moneymaking app (calculated by the number of downloads times price), the most useful product and the most playful. Microsoft will determine the last two subjective awards by a panel decision.

The winners' spoils are paltry in terms of quantity and heft when compared to Google's first Android Developer Challenge, which gave ten teams a $275,000 award, ten teams a $100,000 cheque, and each of the top 50 finalists $25,000 as an incentive to program the best of the first-ever Android applications.

Indeed, we were hoping to see more lucrative prizes from a company whose mobile operating system long ago lost its gleam to the iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and now even the Palm Pre. With such a modest purse, it's doubtful the contest will lure important developers more than the promise of sustained profit and saturating the mobile market on all platforms would. It might attract the smaller fish, whose success could likely be eclipsed by fast-acting bigger players.

Still, for the hopeful winners, odds clearly favour the free and premium applications that are promoted in the app store the longest, and among them, apps already popular on earlier Windows Mobile builds and on other mobile and desktop platforms (Google Mobile App might be one example).

The backdrop to Microsoft's challenge is its submission process, which Microsoft estimates will take ten business days from start to finish. Developers will be able to chart their apps' progress on a dashboard, and access a report if Microsoft denies the submission for breaching content policies (PDF), prohibitions (PDF) and submission guidelines (PDF).

Microsoft's Windows Marketplace for Mobile application storefront will premier on Windows Mobile phones running the upcoming version 6.5 of the mobile operating system, with a version for older phones coming later. It will be the distribution nexus for free and premium Windows Mobile applications that is similar in concept -- and probably in form -- to Apple's iTunes App Store, Google's Android Market and RIM's BlackBerry App World.

Windows Mobile 6.5 phones are expected to hit shelves early this autumn.

Interested developers can access everything from the developer toolkit to the marketplace registration at Microsoft's Web site.