Symbian Signing has been a huge issue in the past. Application signing was expensive, freeware authors had to wait for months to receive their free signing. Anyways, someone at Symbian’s has apparently understood the issue and now offers the following new service:
“Express Signed” process with:
— Publisher ID (only from TC Trustcenter) required.
— No IMEI restrictions on the signed SIS file
— Applications are required to comply with Symbian Signed Test Criteria, however they are
signed immediately via www.symbiansigned.com
— Applications are batch tested (1:N) by Test Houses as an audit (i.e. sometime after the signing event)
— Audit results will be published.
— Low cost (approx 1/Nth of current test house signing cost)
— Available for all PlatSec Capabilities; except COMMDD, MULTIMEDIADD, NETWORKCONTROL,
DISKADMIN, DRM, ALLFILES, TCB
— Will be virus scanned
— NO Warning/Notification prompt when installed on device
Along this announcement, Symbian has also expanded developer certificates to allow for more than one IMEI - this allows for more testing devices per lab(which is great).
Essentially, an application that gets express signed is available signed immediately(without passing the tests). However, Symbian will publish the results of the tests - if your app fails, your reputation will suffer. Also, repeated abuse of this service will lead to your publisher ID being revoked or being blocked from Express signing.
The full announcement is currently being discussed on Symbian’s developer forum here:
http://developer.symbian.com/forum/thread.jspa?threadID=21377