5 ms·

Blackberry to give $10,000 incentive to build apps(with conditions)

24 points by frankydp 15y ago

jeffdechambeau 15y ago
It's desperate but it's also the right move. If I were them I'd give devs 100% or revenue from apps too. Anything to get market share at this point.
TamDenholm 15y ago
I was recently working in an agency on a blackberry promotional project and while i was a good 8-9 degrees of abstraction away from RIM (which in itself created problems) it was quite clear they're WAY behind other phone companies and are frantically trying to claw back some ground but finding it hard because certain "partners" are now refusing to get involved with Blackberry projects. I really think Blackberry's days are numbered no matter how much money they throw at the problem.
- vibrunazo 15y ago
  > it was quite clear they're WAY behind other phone companies Could you expand on that? I don't know much about RIM, would be interesting to learn why are they taking to so long to catch up.
  - excuse-me 15y ago
    When they were the darling of corporate email they weren't interested in having outside developers. Then when the iPhone came out they made a half-hearted effort to attract devs but there was no app store and to sign up you had to jump through the sort of hoops that a supplier of space shuttle avionics to Nasa would expect. Then just when they had the sign up and an app store working they made an announcement something like - "it's all going to change with our wonderful new OS but we can't say at the moment how you will program it or if your old apps will be compatible" - at which point most devs looked at their market share and compared it with the number of customers on iPhone and Android and uninstalled the SDK.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
megablast 15y ago
Screw this, just make it easy to setup up your damn SDK. I tried twice, once earlier this year when it was supposed to be easy, and no luck. I got Android dev working and Xcode (which was too easy!). I have done J2ME dev in the old days. Come on RIM< get your act together.
- gravitronic 15y ago
  Really? I ported my app to PlayBook in less than a week, if you have any eclipse experience (or even xcode) you can get it working..
- canadiancreed 15y ago
  I had similar difficulty with their SDK in early 2010, back when BB was still a force in the market. Nothing makes developing more fun then you're entire IDE crashing, closing, and deleting all non-saved data. Getting it setup wasn't too bad (it still had some quirks), keeping it running was a bloody hassle.
dravidan 15y ago
The new cascades sdk is awesome, and is available for mac, win and linux !
- beeskneecaps 15y ago
  Do you know if Cascades will work on bb 9900 or 9930?
  - dravidan 15y ago
    the cascades is only for BB10 and Playbook http://developer.blackberry.com/cascades http://developer.blackberry.com/cascades
- markus2012 15y ago
  What's the workflow like? 2 years ago I abandoned BlackBerry because of the soul crushing edit/test cycle. Testing code changes required pushing the new code up to the BB JVM, which required rebooting the emulator. It ... took ... forever ...
  - dravidan 15y ago
    yea, i know. it is completely new, not related to BB java. QT like development and c++. The simulator is a vmware image like playbook dev.
dangero 15y ago
They say the app has to generate at least $1000 on its own which means this is meaningless for free apps.
- joezydeco 15y ago
  So publish an app for $100 and pay 10 friends to buy it? You'd still profit $9,000.
  - jm4 15y ago
    Who knows 10 people who have a Blackberry? If I was in school, out of work or otherwise had a lot of free time on my hands I might take a stab at it. It would be low risk. There probably isn't much competition out there so it would be easy to get noticed if you're quick to market. Maybe you could scrape together $1000 in sales. I can't help but think it will lead to quick and dirty, low quality apps and sloppy ports, if anything at all. For anyone who has to make a more difficult choice about how to spend their time I can't see how this platform is even remotely appealing. The handsets are crap. The OS is old and busted. You can't even depend on consistent input methods between handsets. There's absolutely no buzz around anything RIM does these days. The only time I ever see them mentioned in the news it's another story about layoffs, how far they've fallen or both. WP7 looks much more appealing than this. There are some slick looking phones, a mostly nice looking OS and I've actually seen them out in the wild. Still, even WP7 is a distant third place behind iOS and Android. RIM would be irresponsible not to try this. They have to at least show a willingness to try to stay in business. They desperately need developers and they still have some cash. I can't think of a better way to entice developers. Unfortunately, this is too little too late. The time for this was back when Blackberry App World was first released.
    - joezydeco 15y ago
      "Who knows 10 people who have a Blackberry?" Touche.
      - jm4 15y ago
vibrunazo 15y ago
Also note that blackberry is offering tools to easily repackage Android apps to their new OS. [1] Together with the $10k combo, this is a very interesting proposal that me and my co-founder are seriously considering and studying it. Has anyone here used the android to blackberry tools and could share your experience with it? [1] https://bdsc.webapps.blackberry.com/android/ https://bdsc.webapps.blackberry.com/android/
- sjk413 15y ago
  I have attempted to port my app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sjwindsurf.android.windfreakfree https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sjwindsurf...) using eclipse back when the Playbook had just come out, RIM were offering a Playbook to anyone who submitted an application to App World. I was very busy at the time, but attempted to port my app across (WindFreak), as it was supposed to be quick and painless. It basically didn't work at all. It would get to the loading stage in the virtual Playbook, and crash every time, no real way of debugging it (not that I could find). It might have been due to the complexity of my app, and at the time there was no list of compatible functionality. I gave up after wasting 1 day on this. It might be easier to accomplish now.
eli 15y ago
Seems more like just a nice bonus for people who were already planning to release a moderately successful commercial app for Blackberry. And RIM doesn't care about people creating free or ad-supported apps?
- vibrunazo 15y ago
  I don't think it's a matter of they not caring. But how would they support it without giving room for fraud? Their certificate only goes so far, the $1k limit just sounds like an easy way to make sure that the app is indeed reasonably good and has a real market. If they tried to support free apps, it would be much harder for them to make sure.
  - eli 15y ago
    By making the threshold $1000 or 1000 downloads (or 5000 downloads, whatever)? Really, they should be reaching out to developers who already have successful apps on other platforms and convincing them to port. But maybe that's happening also behind the scenes.
dyeje 15y ago
I've only heard terrible things from other people about BlackBerry dev. Specifically, that there were numerous issues porting. Does anyone have any experience to the contrary? What is the BlackBerry user base like at this point anyway?
- gravitronic 15y ago
  I ported my SDL/C++ DJ app DJPad from HP TouchPad to Android, and then to PlayBook. It took less than a week to do the port and on the first day of sales, it outsold 2 months of Android sales in a single day and continues to outsell Android by about 2 to 1. Without any press it did about $300+/day for the first 3-4 days, then drifted down to about $30/day where it is still selling at that rate a month and a half later. I also got a free PlayBook out of the deal as it was during a "write a new app for BlackBerry and we ship you a free PlayBook" offer.

24 points by frankydp 15y ago

It's desperate but it's also the right move. If I were them I'd give devs 100% or revenue from apps too. Anything to get market share at this point.

TamDenholm 15y ago

I was recently working in an agency on a blackberry promotional project and while i was a good 8-9 degrees of abstraction away from RIM (which in itself created problems) it was quite clear they're WAY behind other phone companies and are frantically trying to claw back some ground but finding it hard because certain "partners" are now refusing to get involved with Blackberry projects. I really think Blackberry's days are numbered no matter how much money they throw at the problem.

vibrunazo 15y ago
> it was quite clear they're WAY behind other phone companies Could you expand on that? I don't know much about RIM, would be interesting to learn why are they taking to so long to catch up.
- excuse-me 15y ago
  When they were the darling of corporate email they weren't interested in having outside developers. Then when the iPhone came out they made a half-hearted effort to attract devs but there was no app store and to sign up you had to jump through the sort of hoops that a supplier of space shuttle avionics to Nasa would expect. Then just when they had the sign up and an app store working they made an announcement something like - "it's all going to change with our wonderful new OS but we can't say at the moment how you will program it or if your old apps will be compatible" - at which point most devs looked at their market share and compared it with the number of customers on iPhone and Android and uninstalled the SDK.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

megablast 15y ago

Screw this, just make it easy to setup up your damn SDK. I tried twice, once earlier this year when it was supposed to be easy, and no luck. I got Android dev working and Xcode (which was too easy!). I have done J2ME dev in the old days. Come on RIM< get your act together.

gravitronic 15y ago
Really? I ported my app to PlayBook in less than a week, if you have any eclipse experience (or even xcode) you can get it working..
canadiancreed 15y ago
I had similar difficulty with their SDK in early 2010, back when BB was still a force in the market. Nothing makes developing more fun then you're entire IDE crashing, closing, and deleting all non-saved data. Getting it setup wasn't too bad (it still had some quirks), keeping it running was a bloody hassle.

dravidan 15y ago

The new cascades sdk is awesome, and is available for mac, win and linux !

beeskneecaps 15y ago
Do you know if Cascades will work on bb 9900 or 9930?
- dravidan 15y ago
  the cascades is only for BB10 and Playbook http://developer.blackberry.com/cascades http://developer.blackberry.com/cascades
markus2012 15y ago
What's the workflow like? 2 years ago I abandoned BlackBerry because of the soul crushing edit/test cycle. Testing code changes required pushing the new code up to the BB JVM, which required rebooting the emulator. It ... took ... forever ...
- dravidan 15y ago
  yea, i know. it is completely new, not related to BB java. QT like development and c++. The simulator is a vmware image like playbook dev.

dangero 15y ago

They say the app has to generate at least $1000 on its own which means this is meaningless for free apps.

joezydeco 15y ago
So publish an app for $100 and pay 10 friends to buy it? You'd still profit $9,000.
- jm4 15y ago
  Who knows 10 people who have a Blackberry? If I was in school, out of work or otherwise had a lot of free time on my hands I might take a stab at it. It would be low risk. There probably isn't much competition out there so it would be easy to get noticed if you're quick to market. Maybe you could scrape together $1000 in sales. I can't help but think it will lead to quick and dirty, low quality apps and sloppy ports, if anything at all. For anyone who has to make a more difficult choice about how to spend their time I can't see how this platform is even remotely appealing. The handsets are crap. The OS is old and busted. You can't even depend on consistent input methods between handsets. There's absolutely no buzz around anything RIM does these days. The only time I ever see them mentioned in the news it's another story about layoffs, how far they've fallen or both. WP7 looks much more appealing than this. There are some slick looking phones, a mostly nice looking OS and I've actually seen them out in the wild. Still, even WP7 is a distant third place behind iOS and Android. RIM would be irresponsible not to try this. They have to at least show a willingness to try to stay in business. They desperately need developers and they still have some cash. I can't think of a better way to entice developers. Unfortunately, this is too little too late. The time for this was back when Blackberry App World was first released.
  - joezydeco 15y ago
    "Who knows 10 people who have a Blackberry?" Touche.
    - jm4 15y ago

vibrunazo 15y ago

Also note that blackberry is offering tools to easily repackage Android apps to their new OS. [1] Together with the $10k combo, this is a very interesting proposal that me and my co-founder are seriously considering and studying it. Has anyone here used the android to blackberry tools and could share your experience with it? [1] https://bdsc.webapps.blackberry.com/android/ https://bdsc.webapps.blackberry.com/android/

sjk413 15y ago
I have attempted to port my app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sjwindsurf.android.windfreakfree https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sjwindsurf...) using eclipse back when the Playbook had just come out, RIM were offering a Playbook to anyone who submitted an application to App World. I was very busy at the time, but attempted to port my app across (WindFreak), as it was supposed to be quick and painless. It basically didn't work at all. It would get to the loading stage in the virtual Playbook, and crash every time, no real way of debugging it (not that I could find). It might have been due to the complexity of my app, and at the time there was no list of compatible functionality. I gave up after wasting 1 day on this. It might be easier to accomplish now.

eli 15y ago

Seems more like just a nice bonus for people who were already planning to release a moderately successful commercial app for Blackberry. And RIM doesn't care about people creating free or ad-supported apps?

vibrunazo 15y ago
I don't think it's a matter of they not caring. But how would they support it without giving room for fraud? Their certificate only goes so far, the $1k limit just sounds like an easy way to make sure that the app is indeed reasonably good and has a real market. If they tried to support free apps, it would be much harder for them to make sure.
- eli 15y ago
  By making the threshold $1000 or 1000 downloads (or 5000 downloads, whatever)? Really, they should be reaching out to developers who already have successful apps on other platforms and convincing them to port. But maybe that's happening also behind the scenes.

dyeje 15y ago

I've only heard terrible things from other people about BlackBerry dev. Specifically, that there were numerous issues porting. Does anyone have any experience to the contrary? What is the BlackBerry user base like at this point anyway?

gravitronic 15y ago
I ported my SDL/C++ DJ app DJPad from HP TouchPad to Android, and then to PlayBook. It took less than a week to do the port and on the first day of sales, it outsold 2 months of Android sales in a single day and continues to outsell Android by about 2 to 1. Without any press it did about $300+/day for the first 3-4 days, then drifted down to about $30/day where it is still selling at that rate a month and a half later. I also got a free PlayBook out of the deal as it was during a "write a new app for BlackBerry and we ship you a free PlayBook" offer.