Maemo 5 Extras reaches 3.5M downloads

The maemo.org Extras repository for community contributed software has reached 3.5 million downloads for Maemo 5. Software is offered through maemo.org free of charge and the repository is open to all developers. maemo.org Downloads is the web interface to the software available through maemo.org Extras.

We see the number of downloads grow every day. This makes the maemo.org Extras repository a great place for developers to get their software in the hands of end users. If you are interested in publishing your software through maemo.org, please visit the wiki.

We introduced improved download statics to show developers exactly how many downloads they received. The FM Radio Player application has received over 138000 downloads. FM Radio stats below:

The Extras repository has only been enabled on N900 devices by default in a recent software update. Before this update users needed to manually activate the repository in their Application Manager's catalog list. Also keep in mind that the Application Manager is not very easy to find, because of it being put in the 'More' menu.

Overall I think the number is quite impressive as these devices aren't available for a long time and a lot of people had problems even finding a device in their country.

Maemo 5 Downloads now available

For Maemo 5 applications which managed to reach the Extras repository through the community QA testing queue, maemo.org Downloads now has a home.

The Download catalog automatically imports all information for applications in Fremantle Extras. The only thing you need to add is a nice screenshot. (Or more if you want.)

There are quite some applications in the QA testing queue which are almost ready for promotion to Extras. We should see more entries after the Summit.

If you are coming to the Maemo Summit in Amsterdam, see you there!

Improving maemo.org Downloads

As part of my tasks in the January 2009 Sprint for maemo.org, I want to gather improvement ideas for downloads.maemo.org. A list of improvements that I have come up with can be found at the wiki page. If you have ideas on how we can make Downloads work better for you or have some cool feature you want to have added, please add them to this wiki page.

At the end of this Sprint, I will pick some of the ideas to which I will commit for the next Sprint. Some items that have been added to the wiki page already are:

Category reorg

We had long discussions about what packages categories to use. Implementation and deployment is currently blocked by bug #1805. The current catalog still shows a mostly randomly-selected list of categories. It should be reorganized to use the official list of categories agreed on by the community.

OS200x vs Maemo x

In the past Nokia referred to OS releases OS2007, OS2008, etc. The use of OS200x has been deprecated in favor of Maemo x (e.g., Fremantle is Maemo 5). The catalog is currently organized by OS200x, this needs to be changed to the new versioning scheme.

Automatically create entries in Downloads when package in Extras has user/* section

At the moment not all applications which are available in Extras are listed in Downloads. A script could gather basic information for all user applications in Extras and create entries in the catalog. These entries can later be updated by users to give more details about the application.

Add Application Manager install failures feedback to downloads

There is a plan to integrate install status feedback into the Application Manager. Downloads could use statistics from installation failures to display the "quality" of a package.

maemo.org/downloads automatic updates from Extras

The maemo.org downloads section now automatically picks up updated versions from the Maemo Extras repository. The 'Fresh' list will show the applications that were recently uploaded or promoted to Extras. Developers used to need to update their application entry themselves. By doing the updating automatically, users should not see outdated information about applications.

For the automatic update to work your application needs to be:

1. Available in Maemo Extras
2. Available in the maemo.org downloads section where the 'Project ID' equals the name of your debian package.

Package updates are fetched from the most recent repository for each OS we support. Diablo for OS2008, Bora for OS2007 and gregale for OS2006.

One enhancement I would like to add is automatically update the 'Changes in latest version' field for the entry in downloads. I would like comments from the community on how developers should supply this information.

One option would be to fetch it from the changelog. Problems here are that there aren't many packages using a changelog at the moment and we would need to filter out the real changes from the packaging revision updates.

Another option would be to let the developer enter this data while promoting the package to extras. We could add this step to the promotion interface.

Comments are appreciated.