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.'"

Blackberry is the corporate standard

[Daniel_is_Legnd]

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. Like many products, it became a standard even though a new and better product took it's place.

Re:Blackberry is the corporate standard

[MightyMartian]

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.

Does it matter?

[alvinrod]

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.

Re:Blackberry is the corporate standard

[Jackdaw Rookery]

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.

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

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.