Blackberry to give $10,000 incentive to build apps(with conditions)
crackberry.com
crackberry.com
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.
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.
Touche.
They still have decent usage in Canada, so find some Canadians?
I really think Blackberry's days are numbered no matter how much money they throw at the problem.
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.
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.
Has anyone here used the android to blackberry tools and could share your experience with it?
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.
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.
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.
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 ...