

Just got this email from Microsoft, looks like I have a little work to do …

On Monday, Microsoft announced an update to Windows Phone, targeted at bringing the high-end smartphone user experience to more affordable phones in new places around the world. Windows Phone will now enable our partners to deliver low cost phones using the Qualcomm 7x27a processor and 256 MB on-board memory.

As we said when we initially announced Windows Phone, our prime directive in building this product has been the notion that the ‘end user is king.’ This ideal has guided every decision we made. When tailoring Windows Phone to run on lower cost hardware, an enormous amount of effort went into ensuring as outstanding an end user experience as possible.

We didn’t stop with first party experiences. We know that third party apps are critical to today’s smartphone users, so we focused on ensuring that most apps run well on the new hardware. To accomplish this, a lot of tweaking of the application model was necessary. We’ve implemented OS level changes that will alleviate memory pressure on applications with an automatic paging solution. We conducted a comprehensive testing and optimization effort across a broad spectrum of third party apps. By the time we approached the end of our release cycle, approximately 95% of all third party apps were running satisfactorily on 256 MB devices.

We’re contacting you because you have an app that falls into the category of the 5% of apps that do not run satisfactorily on 256 MB devices. Your app will be flagged as requiring > 256 MB, and will not be available to customers who browse to your app in the Windows Phone Marketplace from a 256 MB device.

We’d love to help rectify that situation. We expect 256 MB devices to garner a significant percentage of Windows Phone sales volume. On 2/27, we publicly released a technical preview of an update to our Windows Phone SDK that will enable you to test and optimize your apps for 256 MB devices. The final version of our update will release next month. Note that you will need to recompile with the final version before you can resubmit.

App Name(s): Aston Villa

http://windowsphone.com/s?appid=7d86bba2-21ab-e011-a53c-78e7d1fa76f8

We’ve observed via our remote instrumentation that your application tends to use more memory than we can accommodate on 256 MB devices. You should use the memory profiler in Visual Studio to track down high memory usage scenarios, and attempt to address them in your code.

App Name(s): Gadget Watch

http://windowsphone.com/s?appid=d4310f9e-545c-e011-854c-00237de2db9e

We’ve observed via our remote instrumentation that your application tends to use more memory than we can accommodate on 256 MB devices. You should use the memory profiler in Visual Studio to track down high memory usage scenarios, and attempt to address them in your code.

If you believe strongly that your application simply cannot be tailored appropriately to run on 256 MB devices, you do have the option to ‘opt out’ of availability in the Marketplace for these devices. Once opted out, your application will be visible in Marketplace on 256 MB devices, but users will not be able to purchase/download your app; they’ll receive a message that your application requires a device with more than 256 MB of RAM. If you submit an update to your application in the future, and wish to remain ‘opted out’, you’ll need to ensure you set the appropriate manifest flag in your WMAPPMANIFEST file to indicate that your application requires greater than 256 MB of RAM.

More information will be available on February 27 at http://create.msdn.com.

Microsoft’s vision has always been about bringing technological innovation to widest set of people possible. We’re excited to begin this process. We hope you will join us.

Thanks!

Larry Lieberman

Product Manager, Windows Phone Developer Ecosystem

NB Great article on memory management from Nokia here: http://www.developer.nokia.com/Community/Wiki/Techniques_for_memory_analysis_of_Windows_Phone_apps

Posted in Windows Phone, WP7, WP7Dev, WPDev