[Windows Mobile Development and Hacking General] Chainfire:
No that isn't how software development should work. I'll explain in more detail below. That is how front-end development should ideally work, though, but that is hardly the same thing.

Taking an entire month to get people on board is a good thing to do, but you'll probably need more. Just saying. As for PocketGear and Microsoft, have you even tried or are you just writing them off because of your own expectations? Because PocketGear supports one app-store doesn't mean they won't support another (its actually in their best interest to do so, especially if it's free). You'd be surprised how freely Microsoft actually offers help to other developers. On several occasions in my professional career I have gotten support from Microsoft development teams even when working on things that were directly competing with their own products (did I mention I never had to pay for that? or that they were very enthousiastic?). If you just try, you might be surprised (on the other hand, you may also get exactly what you expected). Don't try before you have something to 'show for it', though.

That's one horrible way to share code. SVN (and others) exist for a good reason you know. There's also a good reason people use that for collaborative development instead of an on-line multi-purpose 'scratchpad'.

First, I mentioned app-to-date in my previous posts, and I should tell you that is one of the primary reasons (aside from the time factor) that I never started a similar project myself - thought that was a great idea that would go a long way, and why try beating them if you can join something that has promise? As also stated above, I am now entirely not satisfied with how things go with it. This makes me a lot more careful about what I (and obviously my company) will and will not back.

Now please take this to heart: I'm not here to bash you, Nico, that is not my intent. It's in everybody's best interest to have something like this working great. Read that 3 times and store it in your head, because what follows may not be what you want to hear. You may also think I sound like an arrogant "biatch" but I'm just talking from my own experience and theories based on those.

To get this out of the way first: Gecko is not a good name. While some names are undoubtably better than others and many names are not great, Gecko is the name of one of the best known and largest Open Source projects out there.

I truely believe you are developing this app store completely the wrong way around for the goals you have set. If you want this to be an open system doing all the things you 'ultimately' want it to do, what's needed first is an open spec. Instead it seems you are building this spec as you go along and are primarily concerned with the UI, which should actually be your last concern, not your first. This will cause you to redo the database a few times, perhaps a number of complete rewrites of the front-end, etc. More importantly, it does not give you an optimal method for collaboration. For example, if there was a good spec, you could be working on the front-end, while others are building the server-side components.

As somebody else mentioned before, a repo-style system (distributed, mirrors, master-slave, etc) would likely be best. With a well-designed extendable XML schema to allow for various things (updates, versioning, different resolutions, devices features, donations, payments, etc) as base, you can make this go a long way. You have previously mentioned that this would create too much work for app authors to maintain, but it does not have to be this way if you do it in a smart way (hell, if you do this right you could even create server-side gateways to apps that already support app-to-date and whatnot). Server-side scanning could be employed to auto-detect new revisions of applications in various situations, even. Do this correctly and you could port it to other platforms easily as well.

All this would require some infrastructure, yes, but it's not that hard to setup, especially as people have already offered server space and cpu-time for it. You could make it truely free, even. No ads, no payed front-page listings, and still profit from it.

There are a lot of things you wrote that I've read here that I simply do not agree with or are done away as 'too much work', 'later', 'not possible' that either are possible or should be considered right now even if they aren't fully implemented yet. I'm not going to list them all here, as I'm not writing a book, after all. I have put a lot of thought into how a system like this should ideally work, though (as previously mentioned, this is not the first time I have contemplated such a system).

(just to note, I do know a bit about these things, you all may only know me as Chainfire but I have released a lot of applications under various names in various different communities, and have several years of experience building large distributed file- and database-driven applications - some even somewhat similar to this - for the government)