21 Sep 08 T-Mobile’ devPartner Community Ready

Remember when we told you about T-Mobile’s future app store? Well it appears it’s almost ready. In the mean time the devPartner Community Beta is now ready for you to give it a try. This program was conceived in order to help your application get approved faster to be released to the future store.

Developers should register and follow the steps needed to be done in order to have their apps approved. The whole process is free of charge so anyone can already start creating accounts.

Here are a few things you should be aware of before signing up. Each application will have to be tested, verified and signed by True North Services at the developer’s expense. That will be around $200 per test per device. Entry in the program requires you to have a US Employer Identification Number or EIN. Every application must be advertising free. And, surprisingly no games are allowed through the devPartner program. Location based and financial services are also not allowed.

For free applications you should know you have about 15MB/month. If that limit is exceeded, the developer must pay $2.00. Traffic over 30MB will increase that fee to $3.25 while $4.50 will be paid for 60-100MB traffic.

Better create paid applications. Revenue split starts at 50-50. If you meet the following requirements your cut might go to 70%. You get 5% more for being certified for at least 10 devices including 2 of the 33 most popular T-Mobile phones. 5% bonus if the publisher will respond to support requests within 24 hours. Providing phone number and email support is necessary to. 5% extra for accepting responsibility for responding to customer problems with network connectivity. If your application provides user generated content you must provide 24×7 monitoring and filtering inappropriate content. 5% extra for meeting “best practices” requirements for error handling and reporting. T-Mobile will charge you $20 if your refund rate exceeds 5%. Make sure your usage fees won’t surpass your revenue. If that’s the case you might lose some of your revenue percentage.

The devPartner seems good enough but it doesn’t match Apple’s program. And you will be able to create just Java ME applications for now. That means T-Mobile won’t allow any Android apps yet. No Android and no games huh?

What say you developers? How do you like the devPartner Community so far?

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Tags: Android, App Store, java, Mobile Games, software, T-Mobile