You did well to pull out early if you found this part of the process painful, unfortunately end to end it feels like death by a thousand paper cuts. Theres nothing glaring wrong through out but lots of annoyances which really add up, when compared to iOS or Android development

We recently developed this so speaking from some experience http://appworld.blackberry.com/webstore/content/28561

The bb version took far far longer than the equivalent iOS, simply because of other nonsense such as the pain in the signing process (isthesigningserverdown.com the fact it exists tells you all you need to know). Random exceptions being thrown that have no useful meaning and of course the joy of RAPC throwing errors such as "CreateProcess error=87, Parameter is incorrect" which we eventually found was due to the classpath being too long for RAPC to handle

However once complete the application it is something we are very proud of!

Articles can often be summarized in a few lines which make them seem trivial. What really counts for me is why those points mentioned above are worth complaining about.

Yours was a lot more funny than the bullet points.

The summarized points are good, but the article is great. I might read those points and think "hmm... not too bad", but read the article and think "hmm.. wtf!"

I enjoyed reading it however. I will now mercilessly mock RIM along with you.

No time wasted. And you're a good writer to boot. I thoroughly enjoyed the article.

I feel that RIM is still missing the big picture. If RIM makes a phone/tablet that is 3x superior to the iPad and half the price, they'll still sell next to nothing.

Why? The answer is quite simple. Their software is shit. Their developer relations is shit. They are competing not vs hardware, but vs hardware + software.

They made great decisions too... lets ship the "Curve" model with such shit hardware and new software it was a downgrade from the previous top BB model (the one with side wheel). Old model = 3 seconds cold boot, new model = 3 minutes. The curve could not run any software that was remotely useful. It turned into a glorified email/phone device. The internet browsing sucked so bad I had no use for it. Not to mention that the hardware could barely handle the rendering.

So with good decisions like that, can you really expect any more out of RIM?