RIM announces US$100M investment to grow BlackBerry developer community | Hacker News Reader

RIM announces US$100M investment to grow BlackBerry developer community

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23 pointsjackyyappp22 comments

Wow, so you can still bribe people in some ways.

I must say its all very well handing out free tablets etc and offering incentives but maybe getting a few key applications ported and even paying to get them ported would be a better investment.

Reason I say this is having read this part "One of such programs incentivizes developers to build apps for BlackBerry 10 by guaranteeing the developers US$10,000 in revenues from the app. While the official terms and conditions for this program has not yet been released, Alec Saunders, VP of Developer Relations highlighted that apps that qualify for the program must be certified, paid apps built for the BlackBerry 10 and manage to earn at least US$1,000 within the first year."

Well It's hard not to think I could write a application - charge $10 or whatever price and get a few friends to buy that application and from the little time involved to code a "HELLO WORLD" application and get upon the blackberry market and the $1,000 friend investment of which I get a return on. Well I'd then qualify for $10,000.

So in effect the way they are doing this they are opening themself up to being scammed! Sorry but that is how alot will see this approach sadly. Also given the return then why not.

So I hope RIM rethinks this approach and does something more creative. Maybe pick a university and go in with a couple of people who know the RIM platform for developers - give a intro - hand out tablets for the student use for a few months so they can write an application and then those worthy they help promote and get onto the market offering support.

If they also used some of this money to have a developer help line ( no no not samaratins before you joke) but one were a developer can chat online and get questions answeared so they can speed up there application development then again they will gain.

Also If I was RIM CEO I'd look at large consumer markets like military and the like who are starting to embrace tablets and the like and with that at least gain some steady staple income to at least garantee some future.

But as this approach goes as they outlined I feel it will do them no favours.

Your comment is somewhat hyperbolic and misinformed.

Firstly the Blackberry program outlined is not a bribe. They are clearly digging in and offering large incentives, but lets not throw "bribery" around.

Secondly the $10k program is not going to be a free for all, it will be offered to "... apps that qualify for the program must be certified, paid apps built for the BlackBerry 10 and manage to earn at least US$1,000 within the first year". If anything it sounds like Blackberry will make it difficult to get the $10k, since they define the certification process.

What this situation does show is how important having a group of developers working on apps is for mobile platforms these days. It seems that in future it will be much harder for other entrants to enter the market as no matter how great your device and platform, if you don't have any apps for it, people will not buy it.

> If anything it sounds like Blackberry will make it difficult to get the $10k, since they define the certification process.

Yeah. And it's certainly a strange way to put it: "if you can make money on BB, we'll give you more money"... ?

Reading between the lines it sounds like they are saying: "If you are a serious developer who can make a quality app for BB, then here is a low risk way of testing the market".

It's sounds like RIM will be giving developers the runaround (it's a half-baked idea anyway).

RIM continue to be in a tailspin.

Seems like an odd sort of incentive to me.

There is about 18 months worth of risk to the developer to invest on an unproven platform with a phone maker that has seen a dramatic decline in fortunes.

No phones will be released until 2013, so you have that lead time during which there won't be any purchases, then the app has to be on the BB10 market for at least a year.

The developer has to develop or port the app, certify it with RIMM, keep it on the market for a year, hope there are enough phone buyers to make at least $1000 in sales, and then, assuming RIMM hasn't gone under, they will get a top off payment up to $10K.

For me that would be a lot of work and risk for $10K.

> Wow, so you can still bribe people in some ways.

> Bribery [...] is defined by Black's Law Dictionary as the offering, giving, receiving, or soliciting of any item of value to influence the actions of an official or other person in charge of a public or legal duty.

Emphasis mine. These kinds of incentive programs are not exactly rare, when Google gives bug bounties[0], is that a bribe? When KPBC launched their iFund[1], was that a bribe? What about Knuth handing out checks for finding errors[2]? Free hardware for developers[3]?

> Well It's hard not to think I could write a application - charge $10 or whatever price and get a few friends to buy that application and from the little time involved to code a "HELLO WORLD" application and get upon the blackberry market and the $1,000 friend investment of which I get a return on.

Sure, everything can be gamed if the oversight is lacking. If you manage to do it, more power to you, it's probably a good idea to milk RIM while they still exist anyway. Might not be the case a year from now.

[0] http://www.google.com/about/company/rewardprogram.html

[1] http://www.kpcb.com/initiatives/ifund/

[2] http://sunburn.stanford.edu/~knuth/boss.html

[3] http://www.phonearena.com/news/Google-IOs-6000-attendees-all...

“I must say its all very well handing out free tablets etc and offering incentives but maybe getting a few key applications ported and even paying to get them ported would be a better investment.”

I doubt it. Microsoft has done everything you mentioned, but it hasn't helped Windows Phone 7. Instead, they've decided to bury WP7 and are starting over with WP8. And Windows Phone is a decent OS. RIM doesn't have a good OS or modern hardware.

Honestly, I don't think RIM will still exist this time next year.

> Honestly, I don't think RIM will still exist this time next year.

RIM is going to hell in a handbasket, but they'll be around for another 5-10 years. Why? Their market cap is still $4B, their cash on hand is $1.5B (no debt). They may be hemorrhaging users and losing developer mindshare, but they have a lot of money and a lot of time left to make dumb mistakes in hopes of one of them working out. C.f. Yahoo.

In June 2008, their market cap was $83B. In June 2011, it dropped to $13.6B. Today they are down to $4B.

As for cash on hand, they were sitting on twice that amount last year.

The decline is extremely significant and it does no one any good to pretend that they could ride this out for 5-10 years.

RIM Customers Working On Contingency Plans

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-09/rim-s-customers-wor...

  charge $10 or whatever price and get a few friends
  to buy that application

Your plan will backfire. There's no way you'll be able to bribe 100 people to buy BlackBerry 10 smartphones.

With earlier versions of the emulator the process was: 1. edit/compile in the awful RIM IDE 2. __REBOOT THE EMULATOR__ / push new code to the device.

Rebooting the emulator and pushing the new code for a test took over a minute.

I couldn't take it. I dropped support for BB and never looked back.

Have they fixed this?

Yep. They now have 2 options basically: you can use 'Cascades' which is their modified Qt framework (modified by The Astonishing Tribe who RIM bought - awesome designers/developers) with the eclipse-based IDE, or you can write a 'webworks' app which uses web technologies (html5, js, css) and write it in whatever editor you want. The emulators are fine, but I prefer to push straight to a device

I wouldn't recommend developing for Blackberry. They don't care about software copyright. For example, my app has been copied and submitted to App World illegally by some guy in Dubai. So far my DMCA requests have been promptly ignored (and it's been over a year).

Aren't they in Canada, and thus, aren't you invoking the wrong law?

In the comments for the "python for iOS" link yesterday I saw BB lets you write native python. Sounds kind of fun and easy to get started. I might give this a go (although buying a BB might set me back more than I would like).

Half of the RIM appworld is just useless crap, and that's on the BlackBerry and the PlayBook. They should invest in developers — but in house. Come on, there isn't a single beautiful and stable Twitter client for the PlayBook (and the OS isn't, either). It's awkward to use a PlayBook.

Shameless plug: http://adrian.re/why-suits-are-killing-rim (I still believe that if it's just the big guys writing checks instead of working towards a change, money will never come back)

RIM still has $100M in the bank?

They have over a billion in the bank and are still profitable. People LOVE stories about RIM going down the drain for whatever reason, so these stats are conveniently not mentioned. I am not saying there are no problems, but really this is one bandwagon that needs to sloooooow doooown.

They had another massive decline in quarterly revenue YoY (-42.7% from Q1 2012 which was itself -30% from Q1 2011) and then they announced a delay on the BB10 phones until 2013, I'd say that bandwagon is right on this one.

I'm sure they do, but given that there won't be any BB10 phones released until 2013 and then the developer won't see any top off payment for another year after that, I guess the question should be "will RIMM still have $100M in the bank on July 2014?"

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