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

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?'"

Posting from Playbook 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

Works great, very stable, responsive.
Lots of good apps, just filter out some Android apps to get higher quality. A lot of the complaints are from miscreants/malcontents.

Check out BallxHole. Very realistic physics, Free version available. Lots of native Os 2.0 apps. As for phone os10, good point ... Hope they maintain backward compat!

Re:Bad Ecosystem = Business Failure

[kae77]

You mean the Android emulator, with documented situations where it doesn't work? Or you're blaming windows for the problems, which is a Microsoft product? Or developing natively, which hasn't even been fully released yet? You'll have to wait until next week to see the full NDK. I'm no developer, but from what I've heard about Android 'just working' involves supporting hundreds of devices, and plenty of different versions of Android just to get it working. Make no mistake, RIM has not been the easiest to develop for in the past, but they're working overtime to get communication working now. Alec Saunders has made himself completely available to developers to work out problems. Name one other company that gives you that kind of access to people who can make the changes needed. Don't sing the swan song just yet, the bets are still out on this one.

Sorry, RIM...

[alannon]

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.