02 Litmus iPhone contest flawed?
Posted by Kieran on July 21, 2009 under Mobile, iPhone | 
3 Comments to Read
24.07.09 Update James Parton of 02 Litmus has responded over at mobile industry review, thanks James for addressing peoples concerns!
O2 Litmus yesterday launched what looks at first glance like a great opportunity to engage the developer community
However once you read the terms and conditions for the competition, you come across this absolute gem
Your app(s) must be free to iPhone customers and your Apple iPhone Developer Program Portal account must have at least 95 device slots available for registering O2 iPhone App Showdown judge devices. You will be able to retain 5 registered device slots for yourself.
Excluding the time that it would take submitting the 95 UUIDs to the Apple iPhone Developer Program Portal, this simply is not practical with the way the program is currently setup, whereby you are only allowed to register 100 devices in any given year. For probably not the only developer frustrated by this already, view the blog of James Thomson-> running out of adhoc profiles. Understandably Apple are doing this to stop people bypassing distribution of presumably rejected or ineligible applications outside of the app store and therefore protecting the wider community.
However assuming you have 95 available slots, for a reasonable set of test devices in a year most people are probably going to have the following at a minimum
iPod touch at 3.0
iPod 2g at 3.0
iPod 3g at 3.0
iPod 3gs at 3.0
If you factored in having one of those devices as well at 2.0(or making the assumption that in the next 12 months Apple may release another device) you have reached 5 devices
Of course in practice most people that are developing for the iPhone on a contract basis have also added client devices so that the client can view the application on their own device before it is submitted to the app store
Do O2 Litmus really require entrants to hold back 95 device slots or is there another way in which people can distribute adhoc to the judges, maybe O2 Litmus could issue a certificate with a very short expiry
Hopefully this issue gets resolved as otherwise it looks like a good promotion