From my experience this is what is considered part of a Build Acceptance Test and comes before any kind of integration is done with the larger code base. Terminology may differ depending on your environment, but the idea is that there are a class of bugs that are so critical that it is a waste of a Tester's time to install them if they fail. Sure we could have 10-50-500 people install an app while being helpful testers and then report the bug, but if we just filled up their memory and bricked the device, I'm sure they all would have preferred that a simple go-nogo test was done before they were put into a compromised situation, and will be Much less likely to help out with Testing in the future.

This has to be a problem already solved, and likely automated by Nokia/Maemo. If I'm just dreaming, will someone who has some info please let me know.

If Nokia/Maemo hasn't got the tooling or is able to share with the Community, then we Testers need to understand better what happens between -devel and -testing and how the promotion testing occurs and how it could be improved upon.