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Comment by stackghost | Hacker News Reader

Shitty dx is baked into RIM/Blackberry's institutional DNA.

I had a long conversation with their engineering people way back before BB10 came out. At the time you had to apply to get access to the full blackberry SDK, and IIRC you also had to sign an NDA. Meanwhile Android and iOS were in full swing and wouldn't you know it, the platforms that had better developer experience, that prioritized making it easy to write apps, were successful.

Blackberry is just institutionally incapable of handling this sort of relationship with the community. It's that legacy telco "us vs them" mindset at the top of the org, and it filters down whether implicitly or explicitly.

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It was worse than an NDA! You also had to start your application with a trip to a notary to get your ID confirmed.

And if their signing servers were down…You couldn’t load had just compiled onto your own dev / test device.

I loved using my blackberry but I hated developing against it. Bb10 was its own little adventure but had similar draconian dx

One of the dirty secrets of the mobile industry, particularly before Apple showed up and spoiled all the fun, was how many execs and chunks of the ethos were airlifted out of Ma Bell. The kind of moat-building we're seeing take over the internet over the last couple decades is something that mobile carriers already had in heaps.

It was also common for carriers to extort very high fees from anyone selling apps on their platforms. People bitch and moan about Apple taking 30% (which is more like 15% now) but I saw mobile app execs complaining about only grossing 30% after the carrier fees, and so you could only either make blockbusters and pay for R&D on volume, or set your VC money on fire to fatten up the carriers and get nothing, except more powerful carriers, for your efforts.

I'm not at all surprised to hear that RIM was only slightly less evil.

I remember getting some LG phone in maybe 2007 and being excited because I read you could write 3rd party apps and games for it. Then I tried reading the BREW developer docs and trying the emulator, which were both abysmal. Then I read that just to try an app on my phone I would need to pay hundreds of dollars (IIRC it was $400) to get it signed.

That totally killed my desire to develop for my flip phone.

It's crazy to think that that's an ecosystem where paying a dollar or more for a ringtone had been normalized.

If you look up the music industy revenue source breakdowns by year, there was a time when ringtone revenue represented 10%.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/music-industry-revenues-by-...

Was this North America specific. I remember using sdk/dev tools for Symbian. I don't remember timelines, so maybe they changed after iPhone release.

If I recall correctly the Symbian SDK was freely available more or less from the Psion start. Not sure about it's different "editions" though.

> Bb10 was its own little adventure but had similar draconian dx

I did some development for it but the bureaucracy killed my will to do more.

It was a great phone OS though. The real time nature makes even modest hardware responsive.

The BB10-powered Passport was my favorite device

I still want one. Can’t find any.

I still have mine but it's useless because it isn't receiving updates and can't run third party OSes due to the locked down boot chain.

Still runs the base BB 10 apps. My Q-10 still works as a phone. And can read e-mail.

> The BB10-powered Passport was my favorite device

I loved mine.

My favourite device was my Nokia E90 Communicator. Hardware-formfactor-wise that's the best smartphone I ever owned.

Closed, it's a one-hand T9-driven smart candybar phone. Open, it has a usable QWERTY keyboard, a letterbox screen that can display a slice of an A4 or Legal PDF at readable size. I never watched films on it, but you could do in principle.

Even worst! When everything was signed, you would get no support at all! Worst experience ever!

From the people I know who worked there, same crap in internal culture, too.

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