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
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.
That totally killed my desire to develop for my flip phone.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/music-industry-revenues-by-...
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.
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.