Chevron WP7 Shuts Down Windows Phone Unlocking Service

Chevron WP7 the Windows Phone 7 unlocking service has officially been closed. The company which is run by Rafael Rivera, Chris Walsh, Long Zheng and the Windows Phone Team at Microsoft had already sold 10,000 unlocking tokens to owners of devices running the Windows Phone OS in just 2 months since it was up and about. What the service essentially did was to allow users to unlock their device and enable the installation of homebrewed apps or maybe even develop their own. However the team found that many people never moved beyond the sideloading part to become a published developer thus negating the point of the concept anyway.

The team received a lot of emails to let them know how much users of the Windows Phone OS supported them and in return, they have allowed current users a free one-year membership to the Windows Phone App Hub. The $99 fee will be credited to customers who sign up for developer access within 60 days beginning on April 13. The gift also has been extended to those signed up for the unlocking service from January 1^st 2012 until now. For more information, head on over to Chevron’s website, here.