It seems that this is in fact a done deal and really implemented. IMHO bad idea as it makes automatic updates management a pain.

Here is the message.

Dear Apps developers,

As a preamble, I would like to offer my most sincere apologies, this mail should have reached you before some of the changes related here were acted.

I am contacting you to give some updates about the recent and coming changes made on the apps store.

1. Drop old flow of Bitbucket

As announced in a previous email back in August 2019, Bitbucket have changed their identification system and we are now supporting identification via SSH key. (see screenshot)

We were planning to drop the backward compatibility in January but decided to give more time to make the transition as some developpers still had to make that required changes.

The backward compatibility will stop in two weeks starting from today, that is on the 3rd of July 2020. From that date, any repository that still works with the old flow will not be scanned anymore and its applications may be temporarily unpublished from the store until they proceed to change their identification process via SSH authorization.

2. Updates in the vendor guidelines

A first point concerns comparative advertising. We have had to deal with different cases and since the definition of comparative advetising differs from one country to another, it is challenging to make a decision when it involves people from different countries who both reason with their own understanding of comparative advertising. Because of this, we have decided to ban any form of comparative advertising on our platform, effective immediatly.

In the past years, we've had to deal with several abuse by some vendors. Sometimes it is justified by their will to retain their clients or offer more entertaining advetising but we also encountered vendors that were using our platform for, amongst other:

- SEO purpose

- redirect trafic from Odoo.com to their own website

- to only promote their own services, or to sell in direct (make empty modules as advertising pages)

Sometimes with bad UX with popups and static dialogs.

For these reasons, we have decided to remove any link in the descriptions that redirects the visitor to external websites in hopes that it will help having a more professional look to our apps store and offer a better, unified experience to visitors.

We therefore encourage you to make full use of the keys "website" and 'live_test_url' in your manifest file to let the client try a demo version of the module or even contact you directly on your website should they have any specific question that is hard to handle in the existing chatter. I invite you ton consult the guidelines for more details on this subject.

We understand that these decisions imply consequent changes on your end and to help you we will provide a sandbox environment to help testing your descriptions without having to upload your module again and again.

Information will follow on this as soon as possible.

For the Apps Store Team

Rémi Rahir