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RIM's Future Hangs On Developer Support For 'New BlackBerry'

Posted by Soulskill on from the if-you-build-it-they-may-or-may-not-come dept.

alphadogg writes "With its future up for grabs, Research in Motion at its annual BlackBerry World conference next week will focus on simplifying development for its soon-to-be-unveiled BlackBerry 10 operating system. HTML5 is one key technology in that strategy to create a viable ecosystem of applications for a new generation of mobile devices expected to ship by year-end. The simplicity is needed because BB10, based on a real time kernel acquired with RIM's buyout of QNX Software Systems in 2010, is a complete break with the software that runs on standard BlackBerry smartphones. 'It's a bit of a challenge,' says Tyler Lessard, formerly a RIM vice president in charge of the global developer program, and since October 2011 chief marketing officer at mobile security vendor Fixmo. 'There's very little or no compatibility between the old and new operating systems. Existing apps can't be carried forward to QNX and BB 10. The question is, once the BlackBerry 10 smartphones launch, can RIM have an adequate catalog of apps?'"

6 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. Doing it wrong. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Embrace Android, become a hardware power house. License BES tech, advertise battery life.

    1. Re:Doing it wrong. by Sipper · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Agreed. Layer your services on top of Android and be done with it. Why develop an OS, when a free one is there waiting for you to add to it.

      Yeah, that way you can fragment development based not only on what the hardware manufacturer does to the version of Android shipped with the phone, but also fragment as time goes on with various versions of Android. :-/

      The issue isn't that they didn't go with Android -- the issue is that there's no compatibility between their old OS and their new OS. Historically that kind of departure doesn't usually work out well.

      An example of where this kind of transition works is the migration Apple went through between OS 9 and OS X. OS X shipped with an emulator, "OS Classic", to allow people to run OS 9 applications -- and sometime they later dropped support for this. They also shipped 'Rosetta' to simultaneously support PowerPC and Intel architecture -- and now they're dropping support for that, too. But during the transitions they supported applications, at least for a couple of years. With no similar "transition support", RIM is taking a big risk, and there's a good chance they're going to get burnt, because in terms of application support they're starting from scratch again.

    2. Re:Doing it wrong. by muon-catalyzed · · Score: 4, Insightful

      > What is the distinguishing feature?
      Unlike LG, HTC or Samsung, RIM is a North American company, I would still prefer RIM and I want RIM to develop their own OS. Android and Apple-iOS have lots of drawbacks and problems, as a consumer I want more options.

  2. WebOS versus Android Round 2, Fight! by SlashdotWanker · · Score: 4, Insightful

    They're going to be stuck in the same position that Palm was only 3 years further down the line in technology. QNX is pretty slick but they're going to have to encourage (bribe) developers and keep pushing the way Microsoft has with Windows Phone if they want to have a prayer... Every day they wait on hardware is a slightly smaller chance of any kind of success.

  3. "...can RIM have an adequate catalog of apps?" by MyFirstNameIsPaul · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Answer: does RIM currently have an adequate catalog of apps?

    --

    I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.

  4. Sorry, RIM... by alannon · · Score: 4, Informative

    As a (former) Blackberry developer, I've decided that I will be doing no more development for their platforms. They pissed away any goodwill I had for them by their crappy tools, crappy support and their ridiculous policies. As an example, in order to become a development partner, which is the ONLY way to get real support from them, you have to sign a license that basically gives RIM rights to use any of your source code that you develop for their platform. Or typically, if you tried to discuss a problem on their support forums, they would allow developers to spend weeks or months trying to figure out a problem before stepping in and say, "Oh, ya, we know about this. It's on our internal bug tracking system," and then close the discussion to new posts. This was often for bugs that had been around for several major API versions, or even from the very FIRST API version.

    Fighting through the mess seemed like it was worth it when it seemed like everybody in the market for the software I was developing had a Blackberry, but now that it's dropped down to almost zero, you want me to invest my time and money into a brand new platform? No, thanks. At this point, I'm content to see you slip beneath the waves and to try to forget you exist. Goodbye.