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An Experiment In BlackBerry Development
ballwall writes "We've all read the stories about how lucrative selling apps on the iPhone can be (or not), but what about other platforms? BlackBerry accounts for twice as many handsets shipped as Apple, according to Gartner, so I decided to find out. I wrote about my experiences developing my first BlackBerry application including sales, platform issues, and a bunch of other things I thought new mobile developers might want to know about."
He's certainly right about one thing: his app has an ass UI. It's RIM's fault, of course. On the Palm, Android, or iPhone platforms even "hello, world!" looks great. On BlackBerry it's impossible to get even a simple app to look good. All apps on BlackBerry that do, in fact, look good are using full-custom drawing engines. See Bloomberg, Facebook, etc. For the small developer, doing your own custom drawing is a huge undertaking assuming you have any visual design talent to speak of.
I've been a PodTrapper user since this past January, and I have recently started looking into BlackBerry Development myself. As his write-up makes clear, Marcus at Versatile Monkey has to be one of the best developers I've had the pleasure with interacting with. I really appreciate the 'insider' view of developing for BlackBerry, and I'm sure his observations will be useful for my own pursuits.
Much more on the "This will be fun... Oooh, money" side.
Well, and a lot of "#@$&* why is there no app to do podcasts on BlackBerry?". (Commuting sucks without podcasts, imo).
The interesting part is most of the costs are up front. I took two weeks off of work to write the initial version, and after that I've been tweaking it nights and one or two weekend days (two at first, maybe half of one now).
In hindsight I should have tracked my time better, but I'd estimate I spent just over 250 hours in code, and I probably spend about 6 hours a week doing support these days (much less earlier), so about 400-450 hours to this point. That works out to be somewhere between $45-50/hour.
But... the majority of the work is done at this point and I'm still bringing in an additional $1k/week with the ongoing sales, so the picture is getting continually better. It'll be interesting to see how long it keeps up. This slashdot article (and the waves it makes) will likely be the last bit of marketing hoorah I can get out of this app, so while I'm hopeful, I'm not optimistic. As I said in the article, marketing is really really important. (Well, until the App World gets some marketing of its own, I suppose).
Regardless of how it turns out, it was still a lot of fun. And my users seriously rock.
-Marcus
You almost hit the nail on the head. My company decided to go with iPhone development rather than Blackberry development for the simple reason that our target demographic enjoys iPhones for personal use and only carries Blackberries if their management requires/provides them. With that kind of a trend, and with users willing to use their personal devices for work, it makes much more sense to go the Apple route. It didn't really help that RIM's people were aggressive and obnoxious on a conference call with our president, though...
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.