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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.'"
All thirteen of them said so.
I'd rather blame it on the perceived "air" around them. Blackberries have the "air" of being business-y and important, making the user some kind of nobility, while androids and iPhones have that stink of the commoner around them who uses it for petty games and enjoyment rather than important business.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm hearing through the grapevine that Blackberry's corporate position isn't all that secure either. I know of one medium-sized company that has been replacing Blackberries with iPhones, and talking to their tech guy, they may be shutting down their BES server this fall if all goes according to plan. Since integration into Exchange, which is the big deal, isn't all that hard any more, the limited lock in that RIM had is gone.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Considering that with the Playbook they added the ability to support apps written for Android, they could essentially decide to do the same for their phones. The experience may be diminished, but they'll still be able to provide access to a large amount of apps.
This also raises the question of whether or not RIM's decision to allow Android apps to be ported to the Playbook has further influenced developers to abandon creating native applications as they believe that in the future this capability might be extended to BlackBerry's phones.
This in stark contrast to Apple's decision to limit third party development platforms on iOS to a large extent should make for an interesting comparison several years down the road when we can see how these choices have impacted developers and their choices regarding whether to develop native applications for RIM devices.
This is what I was going to say.
When BB was the majority, you had a reason to stick around. But there are new kids on the block that don't rely on developers to adapt to their stupidly absurd development environment.
Considering that with the Playbook they added the ability to support apps written for Android
No, they said they PLAN to add that support. When it will be delivered? Who can say.
they could essentially decide to do the same for their phones.
For existing phones? The ones with no Android specific buttons? The ones that were never built intending to run Android?
No.
The reason all this matters is that there is no coherent story about BB development anywhere (since the tablets use Air and the phones do not), and what development was going on was with a nightmare API (I looked over it once to evaluate doing a port to BB and ran away).
Blackberry has the same problem Nokia did, BB is just much more entrenched and harder to shake loose. But they haven't done anything to firm up the grip they had, and when it goes it will go fast.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That's not quite true. The BB is a secure smart-ish-phone which makes it ideal for corporate/government use. It's locked down and encrypted.
Don't get on your platform high horse or anything, something happening too often here (get off my lawn) but ...
Android isn't secure at all. Until Android phones start coming with hardware based encryption we can't use them, it basically rules them out at the first stage. People are pushing to use Android but it is a no go right now. Same for Windows Phone 7, no hardware encryption = no use, although no-one is pushing for WP7.
We're slowly moving to the iPhone 4 through Exchange and a MDM, people want to use the iPhone, we can configure it just as strongly as the BB and it has AES 256 hardware encryption. It's a win-win.
I haven't had a BlackBerry for a while now, but if I remember right, I may have kept an SSH client on there, and I think once I downloaded an Infocom player, just for fun. But overall, I just never considered downloading apps to be part of the BlackBerry experience. Maybe that's why I find the "DOODZ, WHERE DA APPS AT??" attitude of a lot of iPhone/Android users a little baffling. To me, BlackBerry's software was well-designed and reliable, and it allowed me to do pretty much everything I expect a communications device to do, so I couldn't really picture what else I'd need to downlaod. But then again, I guess to me, a mobile phone is something that spends most of its time in your pocket. That doesn't seem to be how a lot of phone users see it.
Breakfast served all day!
The only reason blackberry is still in existence is because corporations and IT teams don't want to migrate to a new platform. Blackberry phones aren't anymore secure than an Android of iPhone with the proper corporate sync apps installed
And how does one load 'the proper corporate sync apps'? They create an itunes account for each phone? Or does one purchase of the app qualify the entire organization?
How does IT manage software roll outs to a fleet of iphones?
Sorry, iphones suck in IT. They're ok in environements where only a few CxOs have them and you can have person literally walk to each handset when ever something has to be done, or where staff are responsible for their own handsets, and IT only has to give them their email settings. (which is suitable in some environments... but not all of them)
In any situation where real security is required, or IT is expected have any sort of actual control over the devices, iphones are a nightmare. Yes you can use iphone configuration profiles to set policy... but what if you need to change policy... how do you roll that out? There are all sorts of common cases that are not easy on an iphone that are trivial on a BES.
I don't know much about droids... but i'm skeptical their enterprise / IT support is much better.
I've been saying this for years. Developing on the Blackberry was a nightmare...and I wasn't even on that team. Good riddance.
Developing for blackberry is pretty simple java. As much as I despise java, java has a pretty big developer community. For many many years, RIM has given away free documentation & SDK (unlike Apple). RIM doesn't make you sign an NDA. RIM gives away free blackberry emulator software so you can test your application on different models (unlike Apple).
RIM places no restrictions on installing & selling your application (unlike Apple). RIM places no restrictions on what your application can do (unlike Apple). You can sell through blackberry app world, or any other mechanism you choose, including just putting the files on your website for anyone to download.
RIM does not have the ability to remove applications from end-user blackberries (unlike Apple).
RIM doesn't restrict what computer IDE you use to develop in (unlike Apple).
Yeah, that's a valid point. I'm not that big on apps, but there have been a few times when I've been stranded in an airport or some such place and desired some form of mindless entertainment, which the BlackBerry just doesn't really provide much of. BBSSH is a great SSH client, and I feel totally safe storing my keys on the BlackBerry.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
On the plus side, you can't accuse RIM of being ignorant of this problem, or of not taking it seriously.
RIM's decision to support Android apps on their new QNX-based OS must have been very painful and probably resulted in a backlash from partners who had invested a lot in their existing app platform.
The upside is that the Playbook and the next gen of BB phones will have access to the vast store of apps that consumers want these days in spite of the lack of developer support described in TFA.
stick with blackberry, it's not going anywhere, yes they are loosing market "share" but only because the market is growing, BB total sales have continues to increase, but the smart-phone market has increased at a faster pace, hence the "loss" is no loss at all. It's just this crazy perception where only percentages count, not reality.
Yay for installed apps clutter. Honestly, it takes longer to find the right icon than to just use the web browser in the first place.
Don't switch to Android please. I don't want my phone's platform killed off just yet.
That's because like every other Blackberry user I ever knew, you NEVER LEFT THE EMAIL CLIENT. Not even to talk...
Most pre-iPhone smart phone users used the BlackBerry as a portable email client (and breakout game for the subway), while they maintained a regular cell-phone for talking. I can probably count the number of times I received a call from a BlackBerry on one hand, and those were only in situations when the regular phone had a problem. BlackBerries used to pick up ridiculous amounts of background noise (and maybe still do).
TLDR -- you're right: many probably never left the email client to talk... They DID probably leave it to play breakout.
Since integration into Exchange, which is the big deal, isn't all that hard any more, the limited lock in that RIM had is gone.
If integration with Exchange isn't a big deal then why can't ActiveSync give the iPhone the same capabilities as a BlackBerry with BES?
Just curious.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
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.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
That's because like every other Blackberry user I ever knew, you NEVER LEFT THE EMAIL CLIENT.
It's more than that. On the BlackBerry, the email client is more of a unified inbox. Your text messages arrive in the same inbox, as do voicemail notifications. The whole thing is organized in a way that makes sense to me: chronologically, just like my inbox on Thunderbird. That's one reason why I seem to be one of the few people on Earth who actually likes Motorola's Motoblur skin for Android. It gives me a UI that's pretty much how the BlackBerry does it, but it also throws Facebook messages into the same inbox, plus it automatically updates my contacts with information my Facebook friends have provided about themselves -- so I magically have some folks' phone numbers without having to ask for them and enter them myself. To me, this package is about the most useful thing a communications device can do. It's what attracted me to the BlackBerry platform and it's one of the things that made me choose my particular Android phone over some others.
Not even to talk...
Don't know about that. I used the one phone for everything. I think if you saw people keeping a BlackBerry plus a separate phone for voice calls, it was probably because work gave them the BlackBerry but they already had their own phone with all their phone numbers in it. Also, a lot of people like to text their friends as well as call them, and businesses are sometimes reluctant to pay for unlimited SMS plans, so it makes more sense to do your "phone-y" business on your own phone (where your contacts will be able to text or dial the same number) and just do the email on the business BlackBerry.
Breakfast served all day!
FYI. Here is a screenshot of Angry Birds on Blackberry.
The normal way to do that is that the human entered password encrypts a longer secret. The longer secret (or secrets) encrypts the drive. When you change the password then you do reencrypt the longer secret. That way you change the decryption password without re-encrypting the whole device.
If you think about it there's really no other way to do it. If the user can enter the device with just a PIN then that PIN has to open the encrypted stores up.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
With less and less attention being given to the RIM platform, it's just going to make it harder and harder to get a RIM job.
At my work, our oncall phone (aka Uncle phone, a derivative of Big Brother phone) is Blackberry with unlimited data and SMS and ridiculously low prime talk time like 200 minutes. One time, upper manager wanted to move us to "smartphone" during the iPhone/Android wind blew its direction to our department. If we are going to move to "smartphone", I specifically asked for more than 24 hours of idle standby time even with extended battery. In short, no smartphone we tested ever lasted more than 12 hours in standby.
Yes, I made everyone in my department stuck with Blackberry since then.
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
As you point out it isn't the "DOODZ, WHERE DA APPS AT??" that will kill RIM, sadly it is RIM itself. If you look at their competitors all treat their phones as a platform. You get X amount of support, you can update from OS # to OS #1 or whatever, the whole thing is treated as a platform.
RIM on the other hand goes "Oh look, here is our new phone! It isn't compatible with our old phone OS, and BTW we won't be updating squat on the last model (even if it came out yesterday) because we have a new model! Buy it now!" and frankly folks just ain't gonna go for that anymore. People want their phones to at least be treated as current for the life of their contracts, they don't want to feel abandoned three months after getting the thing yet that is EXACTLY what RIM has been doing.
So if you want to know who killed RIM, that would be RIM. My prediction? When their share price gets low enough they will be bought by MSFT and be replaced by a WinPhone Corporate Edition. MSFT has experience with businesses, it'll integrate with AD, and RIM still has plenty of patents that would look good in the MSFT war chest. So final total...Google and Apple trading one and two, MSFT/Nokia in third, everyone else toast.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.