RIM Does Not Want PlayBook Devs, Complains One Potential Developer

fidget42 writes "It appears as if Research In Motion is trying to discourage people from developing for the PlayBook by making the process too darn complicated." This is a pretty serious rant; has anyone had a better experience with RIM's system? Sometimes the gap between developers and users (even when those users are other developers) can be more of a chasm.

Comments

Cry me a river..

[Anonymous Coward]

Boohoo.. the guy is crying about having to fill out a couple forms and downloading a couple files. Writing his rant probably took 3 times longer than all the supposed "extra" time he had to spend on setup compared to competing platforms.

I know first impression counts, but does 30 minutes count in the grand scheme of things when you are going to spend days, weeks or even months learning and working on something? Must be the ADHD generation..

What happened to staying up through the night because you are so excited to learn and get something working?

Re:Cry me a river..

[Superken7]

Why would someone say up the night developing for a platform that is a PITA when they can go and develop painfully for "the King" ? (be it iOS or Android, whatever)

I would rather focus on making my app great rather than wasting time dealing with a hideous development environment.

Moreover, the author not just complains about time. Its about money, too:
"I do, however, notice that although it is currently free to register with App World, in the future there will be a $200 USD charge. Now just in case you’ve never looked in to competing developer programs, Apple charges $99, and Google charges $25. Considering you are by far the underdog in this game, how do you justify charging double the price of the market leader? Also, with the $99 or $25 charge, Apple and Google let you publish and unlimited number of apps on their stores. You, on the other hand, have decided that for $200, a developer should only get to publish 10 apps, and it will cost $200 for every additional 10 apps"

My Favourite part

[Superken7]

"First up, I have to put the simulator into development mode, which makes total sense because of those times when you don’t want to use the simulator for development."

I really hope RIM doesn't consider that dev environment to be anywhere near final. Or wait. Maybe they just want to encourage devs to write Android apps and use them on the Playbook?
Yeah, given how messed up the process is, and how critical it is for a platform starting at 0 native apps to start ramping up available 3rd party apps, I am going to assume they just don't wanna have you write playbook apps, they just want you to write Android apps! (assuming they are really compatible)

Re:Update

[mangino]

It's not 20 minutes more, it's an hour of installation. At first, the mac instructions had you download the windows version of VMWare Fusion. To even be able to try out the sdk costs $80 on a mac. Note that you can get started developing for iOS at no cost with a single download.

As a developer, little time sinks can make a big difference. For example, building and running my app on the iPad simulator takes about 5 seconds. It's easy to test iterations and small tweaks to the UI. On Android with the honeycomb emulator, it takes more than a minute (assuming the emulator is running, it takes about 3 minutes for the emulator to start on a dual quad core box with 16G of ram) I never found out on the Playbook, since I don't want to spend money buying an emulator for a currently vapor product.

(accidentally posted as AC the first time)

I disagree about the $200

[larry bagina]

$200 vs $100 isn't a big deal, particularly if this thing is targeted towards businesses. And it's $0 today. Perhaps the biggest problem with the iTunes App Store (and Google Marketplace) is the spam apps -- shit that takes little or no time to build and has no value. RSS feed apps, wallpapers of images from other games, copy/paste a wikipedia article, "howto: guides for other games, etc. Putting a price on it should eliminate some of that shit.

Re:I disagree about the $200

[EvilIdler]

Apple don't even need you to fax anything nowadays. Everything can be filled in on iTunes Connect. RIM's process is ridiculous by comparison.

Requiring VMWare? Installing an ISO from an installer, THEN requiring you to install that in the VM? What the hell? Android's SDK, which is about one download more complicated than Apple's (in other words, not very complicated) gets you a simulator/emulator right there in the IDE. Why couldn't RIM look at a working setup like that for inspiration?

Whining, nothing more

[gaspyy]

Random whining programmer thinks process X is too complicated for him.

For me it was a non-issue. It took me exactly 2 hours to port my game (http://itunes.apple.com/app/sparkchess/id398133128) from iPad/Android to Playbook and test it, including installing the simulator. The signing process was a little more complex but really nothing fancy. If anything, on the whole I found the process faster and easier than publishing on iOS.

It took about one week for the app to be approved and it's now in AppWorld.

Re:Of course, it's RIM

[A Big Gnu Thrush]

I did BlackBerry development for years, and RIM was always difficult to deal with. Simple stuff like having to fill out the same web form every time I wanted to download something, even though I was logged in. Android and iOS have better tools, better support, better experience for the developer.

Re:Can we let RIM die, already ?

[opportunityisnowhere]

Users stick with the platform because it works, it still does what it was designed to do extremely well and that's what most enterprise users are looking for. That's users though, RIM is losing developer support left and right. I attended a local dev group meeting and I was the only mobile dev that still supported RIM in the bunch.