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Comment by rogerbinns | Hacker News Reader

What specifically do you have to do to get that dev certificate? Is that for you or for the device? (Note I'm only talking about the case where you want to put you own app on your own device, not about publishing it to the general public.)

Hopefully my original post inspires someone to try this with all the platforms. I'm particularly aware of the requirements to create accounts and registrations, the size of downloads, how limited your choice of host environments is etc.

The next fun step is how do you get your hello world onto a friend's device without using a cable or requiring them to be in your presence.

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Besides paying the $99 for a dev account (that allows you to publish to the marketplace), you can pay ~$10 for a personal app account, which allows you to load 10 apps of your own creation onto your device. Much cheaper if you just want to put your own app on your own device.

Please tell me this is a joke.

I have to pay to load applications I wrote myself on my own device?

This is even more ridiculous than just locking down the platform. This is a slap in the face. Good thing WP7 is failing to reach the mass market so far. I seriously hope it stays that way.

You're paying for an affordable, restricted developer account. This is better than iOS. Don't feign outrage or spew hyperbole just because it's not 100% of what you demand. You can't defend your argument that a $10 dev account is somehow worse than a $99 dev account.

My point is that this is ridiculous in the first place. There is no reason to disallow people from running their own code on their own devices.

It's even worse like this. What they are doing is essentially making an undesirable situtation, then capitializing on that by offering you a slightly less shitty solution (which is still far from reasonable):

"Hey, you could buy a $100/y dev account, but we're so incredibly generous that we'll allow you to run a few programs at a premium of $10!"

They are charging for something that should be one of the most essential freedoms of a computing device. This is insane, no matter how you try to sugar-coat and excuse it.

The basic argument is, it's a cell phone. It's an embedded device. It's not a computer (as proved by the "post-PC-world" phrase). A traditional cell phone could run apps (Tetris, Snake, etc). A game console is built to run "apps" (video games). Yet no one is loudly complaining that they cannot run their own software there for free. A smartphone is more closely related to a game console than a traditional personal computer.

Will we reach the point where smartphone (or smartphone like devices in the future) are considered computers and we can use them freely? I hope so. It might happen. It might not. What we can count on is there will always be the choice on the market for those who require that choice. Not everyone does. I have a Windows Phone. I've never been bothered by not being able to install my own software. I also have an HP Touchpad with Android and WebOS, the two freest OSes on the market right now. Never sideloaded. I don't need to.

My point? Your outrage is misplaced, for several reasons listed above. People often talk about consumer choice, but the rubber meets the road when consumers willingly make an informed decision (in my case) that the crowd doesn't understand. I bought a Palm Pre not because of the freedom, but because of the UX. I bought a Windows Phone for the same reason. Sometimes a smartphone is just a smartphone. You might not understand my choice, but I do and that's what counts in the end.

Neither of your point disproves the fact that it's ridiculous. It's not about whether you want to run your own applications or not, it's about having that choice whenever you want to. On every computing device. This is - or should be - a fundamental Freedom, one which you should not be able to sign away, not even by an "informed choice".

Citing examples like feature phones and gaming consoles isn't helpful, either. Just because nobody complained in the past doesn't make it okay. Also, as the quite active homebrew scene around most consoles proves, there is value in being able to run your own stuff on gaming consoles. You might remember the deep shit that Sony got themselves into when they decided to turn off OtherOS on the PS3 for no reason whatsoever.

Anyways, I think consoles - while owning quite a few myself - are a thing of the past. They're eventually going to die. The coming next generation might be the last we see.

You pay $99 for an App Hub registration, then sign in to the device registration app on the desktop with the device plugged in. After that, it's pretty much automatic. I haven't done that much WP dev yet, so I'm not sure about friend's devices, but so far it's been relatively painless.

(Well, except Windows making installing VS and the Zune software almost impossible, but that's just what happens with Windows. On a clean install. After installing all the updates it wanted. Of which half failed the first time. And rebooting. And rebooting again. But none of that is related to Windows Phone, except that as Apple doesn't make tools for their competitors OSes, Microsoft doesn't either.)

Just as an aside, you get free registration with App Hub as a student via DreamSpark (or at least you did about a year ago; I assume it's still the case.)

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