Re: Permissions, certificates, and devices' questions

Hi yarmobile,

We hosted some signed applications (Verisign certificate) for a while but in the end decided it wasn't worth the effort.

Most of the SonyEricssons and Nokias we tried included the route certificate, but not the Motorolas or the other handsets we tested.

Quite often we found that even though the app was signed, the user still had to manually configure the phone not to ask questions after install and most user's had no clue about this and continued to answer the questions anyway.

Also quite a few users did not set their handset date since the last time they removed the battery so the date defaulted back to Jan 1st 2001 say and the certificate looked invalid as the date was out of range (this was in about 2005). We tried but couldn't get post dated Verisign certificates.

The last nail in the coffin though was the ungraceful way most phones failed, if there was no route certificate or some other problem, the user would just get a message saying "Fail" during install.

Nowadays we just don't bother with the signing process, happily some handsets are starting to deal with things slightly more sensibly, the Nokia 6300 - lovely phone :) only asks about HTTP access once and then remembers the response during the session unlike the Motorola KRZR which asks the same question every 5 seconds like some demented toy.

For the KRZR and others like it we do try to minimize the number of requests, for example if we need to download 5 images, we'll squeeze the data into one request and extract the images on the handset from the binary data.

Hope this helps, good luck with it
[Message sent by forum member 'eric_donovan' (eric_donovan)]

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