A bit of context
Windows Phone 7.5, codenamed “Mango”, was the version of WP7 that finally felt complete. It shipped in late 2011 with a serious upgrade story: multitasking, deep Twitter and Facebook integration into the People hub, threaded messaging across SMS / Facebook chat / Windows Live Messenger, IE9 with hardware-accelerated rendering, and a new Marketplace flow for both users and developers. For developers, Mango added Silverlight + XNA combined projects, Live Tiles you could update from the cloud, push notifications, background agents, and full SQL CE access on the device.
App Hub was Microsoft’s developer portal at the time — the place where you uploaded your XAP package, paid the (then) USD 99 yearly fee, and went through the certification process before your app could appear in the Marketplace. Certification typically took a few business days and tested everything from startup time to back-button behaviour to localized resources.
Today I uploaded my first Windows Phone 7 Mango app
Today I uploaded my first Windows Phone 7 Mango app to Microsoft’s App Hub. It is all about the service provided by OnlineTvRecorder.com. It talks to their API to view TV programs/schedules, shows your own recordings as well as future highlights and top-recordings. An integrated search lets you search the OTR catalog using keywords.
I just got confirmation that it is officially certified and published to private beta test.
Please let me know if you are interested in testing ;-)
Looking back
OnlineTvRecorder is a German cloud DVR service that records broadcast TV in the background and lets you stream or download what you’ve requested. The reason a third-party app was useful at all was that the OTR website had a fairly old-fashioned UX, and a phone client that knew about the API surface — programs, schedules, your own recordings, future highlights — was a nicer way to interact with the service than the mobile web of the era.
The Windows Phone story itself didn’t end well. Microsoft pivoted to Windows Phone 8 less than a year later (which broke the Silverlight-based runtime), then to Windows 10 Mobile, and eventually announced the end of new feature work in 2017. The Marketplace was shut down for new app submissions in 2019. So the platform this app shipped on no longer exists, but the experience of building for it — small device constraints, tile-driven design, App Hub certification — was a useful preview of how mobile development would feel on every platform afterward.