Developers Defecting From BlackBerry

jfruhlinger writes "Mobile app developers who build for multiple platforms need to figure out how to conserve their resources somehow, and many are choosing to do so by not bothering to build apps for BlackBerry phones. It's a combination of declining market share and the general difficulty of building apps for the BlackBerry platform, one developer told Bloomberg: 'RIM brought in a touchscreen and mixed it with a thumbwheel, a keyboard and shortcut keys, it made it really difficult and expensive to develop across devices.'"

Comments

Re:Blackberry is the corporate standard

[acoustix]

From an IT standpoint. Blackberry Enterprise sucks. Bailing on that is a must.

1. You need to install a server software to integrate with Exchange (unless you reroute all your email to some internet email service)
2. Not suppose to have Exchange and BES on the same server, so one more point of failure.
3. Said server requires....is it Java, Kerberos, and mixed Server OS environment combination that's broken? I don't know, I stopped trying to fix it. RIM didn't have a good explanation and their ultimate solution sucked.
4. Not fully integrated with Exchange, Exchange's mobile policy's don't push to it. Blackberry Server has it's own mobile policy I guess

Smartphones that talk to exchange are wham, bam, thank you ma'am. For BB, if you have the Java,Kerberos, mixed Server OS issue, you can't add new phones. If you can't get into your exchange server to do the MINOR configuration, you have bigger problems then not adding a new phone.

The only thing I wish they'd port to Exchange-capable phones is, RIM doing token/serialized authentication, removing the need to redo password on the phone each time it's changed.

In other words, you haven't read any documentation on the BB environment. Besides, BES supports more Exchange features than ActiveSync. And yes, BlackBerries have their own policy settings separate of Exchange with much, MUCH more control over the devices. This is something you would know if you would have actually read something about the BB platform.