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Single Developer Responsible For Over 47k Apps In BlackBerry World
hypnosec writes "If you are a BlackBerry owner, navigate to BlackBerry World (or just visit the website) and you will find that developer S4BB has developed over 47k apps for the BB platform. Unsurprisingly, most of them are just spammy apps that don't add any value. Apps like 'Restart Me Free,' 'Daily Quote,' 'Lock for SMS,' 'Search for Amazon,' 'Silent Foto Free' are just a few among the thousands of apps on BlackBerry World that actually have no utility whatsoever. BlackBerry announced back in May that developers were increasingly interested in making apps for the platform, and that BlackBerry World had more than 120,000 apps. This raises questions about the authenticity of the claims, and about the approval process that's been accepting these apps. S4BB may have a few useful apps for the platform, but that doesn't mean all of their apps are of 'A' quality. A statement from BlackBerry said, 'Developers in all app stores employ a number of different monetization tactics. BlackBerry World is an open market for developers and we let market forces dictate the success or failure of these tactics.'"
We let market forces dictate the success or failure of these tactics
The same market forces that cause no one I know to actually own a blackberry?
If you go to the company website at http://www.s4bb.com/about/, you find its location as :
S4BB Limited
1104 Crawford House
70 Queen’s Road Central
Central
Hong Kong
Interestingly, this address is a virtual office, as shown on
http://www.jumpstartoffices.com/eng/virtual-office/hong-kong/crawford-house/
This means that you have no slightest idea of where this company is located...
spam for BlackBerry.
Yeah, that can hardly be called development. How much effort does one have to put into developing an app in order to produce something new? I don't think you can do much in one day.
Putting this number in some perspective, the oldest person ever lived for 44724 days. So nobody would reach 47k applications at one per day.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
FIRST POST! -This automated post is a service of S4BB Slashdot First Post Blackberry App
The reason Blackberry is suffering is because no jounralists post anything positive, ever.
Really this is a pot calling a kettle black. Android of all the platforms has the most useless number of apps.
Yeah, but if all you're changing is a config file that has queryurl="amazon.com?search=[value]" and backgroundcolor="green", you could probably release 100 a day.
Maybe not 'real' applications, but the 'give me some money, advertising revenue, and access to your personal information' things.
This is not too different from pushing penny stocks -- they're mostly worthless, but if you can convince someone else to buy it from you, you can still make money.
And it sounds like BB is perfectly willing to allow this to happen, likely so they can have the illusion that there are in fact apps for the platform.
I think it pretty much sums up their current state -- dying, and desperately hoping that someone else will write something to make their platform compelling.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
One of the old posts in slashdot suggested people with desirable phones like iPhones and Samsung androids to get fake blackberry like skin to make the phone less attractive to thieves and snatchers. So if Blackberry copyrights the skin design they can actually make some money off their own suckitude.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Doesn't Apple and Android also allow selling books as apps? Then you have all the apps that are little more than portals to websites. All of these are legit. Looking at counts is pretty silly.
Nothing new about this. 60% of the apps in the Apple app store have never been downloaded. Android apps the same. The whole argument about who has the most apps, or if a lot of them are useless spammy apps seems a bit pointless. If your going to single out one platform, that is. http://bit.ly/Rfb9FV
So basically one person wrote half of all of the BB apps?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
The world's oldest civil rights organization, the NRA, isn't the same group of people assassinating Americans overseas, collecting your email, and harassing political opponents. Those are the exclusive province of the Obama administration.
If you have any scripting skills at all, you could do a lot more than that.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I'd rather have an app store full of spammy apps than one that rejects good apps for no reason (or because they compete with the manufacturer's own apps)
You may very well think that, but market forces dictate success, as noted, and the market seems to think it's better to have an app store where you can actually find useful applications because they're not buried under a mountain of crap.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
While I'm sure there are plenty of apps on all platforms that have no utility whatsoever, the submitter did a poor job in selecting some of the apps in the BB App World that would be worthy of this description.
Restart me free: Seems useful enough in that it allows a restart of the device without having pull the battery. Is it really any less useful than creating a shortcut which opens the All Apps menu on the Windows 8 start menu?
Daily Quote: I would have no use for this app, however this doesn't diminish the value it has to the people who use it.
Silent Foto Free: as the name suggests, this app lets you take photos without the shutter noise. Could be useful in some situations; taking photos at a chess tournament immediately comes to mind.
Lock for SMS: lets you PIN protect any app on the device. Surely ideal for parents wanting to stop their youngsters from accessing particular apps?
Search for Amazon: looks like it simply redisplays the Amazon mobile site in an app and adds a few features e.g. writing a review into the native interface. In the absence of an official Amazon app for the Blackberry, it may well be useful for the avid Amazon shopper.
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
...of the hundreds of silly VB programmes around found on the *free* sites in the late '90's~ that opened the CD Tray on Windows machines.
"Chapter 11 is far from dead. "
Far, huh? What's the distance, as in what exists between bankrupt (Kodak) and dead?
Their income is down 70% over the last five years. Sure, the last five years have sucked for everyone, but a 70% drop is perilously close to 100%.
That said, it WAS a huge company 20 years ago, so even after shutting down most of the company they still had half a billion in revenue for 2012.
According to sales figures, just about no one agrees with you.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
It's rather simple to police. Just disable the ability of apps to deliver advertising. Only police that, and the majority of the apps you mention would be worthless.
And once you've instituted that policy, then you can remove apps with a less than 100 downloads per year, or at whatever level you want. Apps need to be useful, and you need to trim the list of apps down every once in a while.
The more of these silly apps and their variations exist, the more useless garbage noise I have when searching for an app I REALLY want to use.
The whole advertising model for apps may have improved the ecosystem and quantity of apps initially. But it's getting worse as app clone developers get more desperate, and people get more wise to filtering out the spam apps. This happened with normal web advertisements, and look where we are now.
And it sounds like BB is perfectly willing to allow this to happen, likely so they can have the illusion that there are in fact apps for the platform.
Its a mind bogglingly stupid numbers game. The reality is that 100,000 or 2,000,000 apps in an app store is a completely worthless indication.
Their was guy who won "every game on steam" back in 2011 has ~1800 games. Now I'm sure there are dozens (even hundreds?) of titles added since then. But still we're capping out at 2500 titles.
Now that's certainly not every game ever made, and it certainly leaves out some first class titles as well, and its just games not 'apps' (maps, messaging, note taking, document editing, cloud storage access, etc etc etc etc...)
But it gives you sense of the scale of a 'big app store' that REALLY has honest to goodness curation.
So realistically there are probably quite a bit less than 20,000 "real" apps. And if you took out the games, and just looked at the productivity stuff people needed the number of titles that anyone actually cares about likely numbers in the low hundreds.
So 100,000 apps? A million? Two million? Its all mostly just truly worthless garbage.
An app store with the right apps could be "fully stocked" and "compelling" with more than everything its customer base would really need or want or care about with as few as 500-1500 apps.
I would have trouble coming up with 47k app names. It's hard enough just trying to come up with sane function and variable names in namespaces two or three orders of magnitude smaller.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
The guy who made iFart made 80,000$ within two weeks of launch.
If a shell script is an "app", then the bar has been set too low.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I wonder if they got filthy rich during the Blackberry Port-A-Thon.
I far and away prefer the Android.
I had an ancient BB World edition, for the QWERTY keyboard (and that's about all it could do well, text/email)
A had an Android tablet (tegra quad core something, cost me a pretty penny too) and the Android app store was quite easy to search.
I now have an iPhone 4 and I *hate* it, typing any text it terrible, not least of which for the constant autocorrect getting in the way, but it's very difficult to find anything useful in the app store (a battery meter that displays a numerical percentage for example)
I've encountered more BS apps in the Apple world than I ever did in the Android environment.
Next phone will be an Android.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
47,000 apps is nothing.
.... Assholecompany 64 GB SSD drive for Zenith obscure model 497.
I was looking to buy an SSD drive, so I tried amazon.co.uk. Entered "SSD" into search, restricted departments to "Computers and accessories".
There are 96,000 different SSD drives for sale. 95,500 are sold by the same company. Their list of drives are: Assholecompany 64 GB SSD drive for Acer obscure model 1. Assholecompany 64 GB SSD drive for Acer obscure model 2. Assholecompany 64 GB SSD drive for Acer obscure model 3.
Sorry, the name isn't assholecompany, it is "Arch Memory". They are basically performing a DOS attack against anyone else trying to sell SSD drives on Amazon.co.uk.
You don't get it. You use the scripts to change key parts of the apps so that you can churn out different apps all day long.
Continued availability of devices with physical thumb keyboards, for one. Apple refuses to make an iPhone with one, and fewer and fewer Android phones have them.
You know, I bet if I wrote an ebook guide on how to unlock your front door with your house key, it would sell a few. If it takes me 5 minutes to knock one of these guides out, and I can get a handful of 99 cent downloads a year on each of them, I can make a pretty nice living. Oh crap nobody steal my ideal now.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
A strict interpretation of no ads in apps would kill Amazon, eBay, and Craigslist apps, which are designed to let users search for sellers advertising products that interest them.
If you are using a shell script to "generate" apps, then the bar has been set even lower than I first thought. :(
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
And once you've instituted that policy, then you can remove apps with a less than 100 downloads per year, or at whatever level you want. Apps need to be useful, and you need to trim the list of apps down every once in a while.
There are certainly apps that are very, very useful but only to a very small number of people. Why would you discriminate against them?
Too bad though that because of people like him mine will never be proud of me. :(
This just reinforces what I said the other day about Apple's App Store approval process really making a difference to the quality of the applications available for iOS.
Apple have a rule in their guidelines:
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Not the design, or IP though .
its a company.
Judging from their corporate picture, might be a team of 13.
Then you are an idiot.
Spam is the #1 problem of the information age, because information becomes meaningless when it is drowned in noise. The only reason that the Internet is still useable is because we are fighting a constant war on spam.
Imagine for a minute E-Mail without spam filters. I mean entirely without. No blacklisting, no taking spam ISPs offline, no IP filter, no greylisting, no spamassassin, no gmail you put in front of your real mail just for the filtering - absolutely nothing of that.
Now imagine search engines with no effort to filter out the spam. Imagine a Google that doesn't downrank spammy sites.
Imagine telemarketers being allowed to call you whenever they want, as often as they want.
If you have any imagination whatsoever, you'll agree that spam is a really huge issue. If you have really good imagination, you might want to apply for therapy after this traumatic minute.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Does your guide cover the "Lock covered in tiny venomous spiders" case? If not, I'm going to need a refund.
I feel fairly sure that the $10,000 app guarantee had something to do with this. With 47K apps the odds that more than a few will cross the $1,000 threshold are pretty good.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17926037
That's surprisingly complicated at times. Last weekend a property manager gave me a key to an interior office rather than the front door. I had to go around back, find a window with an AC unit, pull it out, and climb in. The people I was with looked at me like I was crazy, despite the fact I had a key in my hand and an invitation to enter the property.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
This shows you what mission statements are worth.
(Less than used toilet paper)
"To continuously enrich the end-user experience of high quality mobile software."
http://www.s4bb.com/about/
http://www.stolk.org/tlctc
Discriminate? You make it sound dirty... It's cleaning up the market place so that it's easier to find apps that are truly useful, to a moderately sized group of people. At some point, having thousands of useless/trivial apps will lower the value of the entire marketplace.
I would pay a monthly subscription fee for such an app store. Really, I would. Even if I wasn't buying every month, I'd still do it. I want it entirely unlikely for useless apps to ever find it profitable to spam the marketplace, even from the tiny tiny proportion of people that will buy the app by accident and forget to ask for a refund.