When you distribute freeware you end up gaining a great insight into the kinds of problems experienced by end-users. The most frustrating problems for me are those that involve too many people emailing with the same old problem. For example, in the past when I distributed significant numbers of Pocket PC software, I continually got asked how to find the ‘help’ in my applications and how to close an application as opposed to put it into background with the ‘close’ icon. Neither of these were obvious under the Pocket PC OS and I considered them Microsoft design faults.

A similar thing has now happened with my S60 3rd freeware that’s downloaded by hundreds of thousands of people per year. I now get far too many emails from people saying they are getting the message "Invalid certificate, cannot install".

This is because on E Series (but not on N series) devices, users must explicitly turn on installation of unsigned applications. If you get the message, "Invalid certificate, cannot install", you need to change the setting in App. Manager from "signed only" to "all software". I put this information on my web pages next to the download but people don’t read it.

I suspect that Nokia chose to protect the E Series phones in this way because they are intended to be enterprise as opposed to consumer devices. Nevertheless, I question this policy given the extra warnings users get when installing unsigned applications. Compounding this problem is the fact that this error message means nothing to the average user.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 30th, 2007 at 7:24 pm and is filed under Series 60, Windows Mobile, Mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.