After many sleepless nights, i've finally completed the app and got approved by Microsoft. It was a pain to be rejected twice, first due to my negligence (i forgot to assign the app icon), second time was due to copyright issues (i've used the windows logo in the icon).
But nonetheless, it's approved and finally live in the app store now. You can download it here
Several roadblocks hit me, due to some Windows Phone Toolkit updates, LongListSelector are now officially part of Phone.Controls, microsoft had finally made it part of the official controls.
I was using the old toolkit and had several problems in maintaining the memory foot print low. My device was a Lumia 620 and was capped with a 180mb memory limit. After days of OutOfMemory exceptions, i've customised HubTiles so much that it no longer look and behaves like the original. I had to reduce the number of controls within HubTiles, take out different animations such as flip and rotate.
I was able to support both wp7 and wp8, until the new control came out with so much feature that i didn't have to code manually is luring me to ditch wp7. And so i did, i decided to support wp8 only and have the new LayoutMode="Grid" and virtualizing capabilities built-in. Now the app is able to load hundreds of hubtiles in a panoraitem without any hiccups.
The old version can only load like 50 tiles at max, before crashing due to the memory pressure. I've incoporated a feedback channel within the app and hope that with user's feedback, i can improve the app further and let the Windows Phone community have what they deserve (A rich appstore)
