A new year and we got new things to announce. We have been working on apps.formeego.org for a while. The idea is to have a community driven Apps catalog for open source applications. Created by the people who also contributed to maemo.org Downloads (More than 100M downloads and counting!), many of the concepts born there were brought along.
This site includes a community driven QA part, where you can test apps and fill in a simple score card about the app. Once a certain amount of positive reports have been made, the app will automatically go to the stable Apps site. Apps will also go through some automated tests, so we can prevent broken applications from entering the repositories.
With the N9 device now in the market, the community needs a central place to publish their applications. If your application needs special security capabilities, like sending text messages etc, you need to publish your application in a place that is 'trusted' by the device. Nokia has now granted Apps the same credentials as Nokia Store. This means that we can now let the community publish applications which need more than the default credentials.
We have a very nice Apps client for use on your N9. This makes it very easy to browse through the available apps and install them on your N9.
Most of the infrastructure and processes are in place, what we need now is help from you! Whether you are a developer (submit your app) or an enthusiast (help us test new apps), there is always a way you can help making it more attractive to end users. Make sure we are getting more new applications more quickly available for everybody!
The current setup of Apps for MeeGo is so that you can't have any external dependencies for your application, other than what is provided in the SDK and the Nokia Apps repository. I'll post a proposal on the wiki about how to allow these dependencies while trying to prevent a mess :)
A last thing to add: We see that MeeGo.com is going away at some point and we have a maemo.org heritage, so we are planning to move our authentication, OBS and wiki to maemo.org in the coming months.
