One App Developer Responsible for 47,000 Apps in BlackBerry World? | Hacker News Reader

One App Developer Responsible for 47,000 Apps in BlackBerry World?

berryreview.com

41 pointszainny24 comments

I was involved in a Blackberry portathon. They were offering USD 100 for each of the approved apps submitted at that time. This incentive surely didn't help. I remember participants there, raising concerns about 20-30 different apps by same user converting one currency to another. But it seems BB wanted quantity so badly that they are ready to compromise on the quality side. Infact they were actively promoting a 3rd party tool Blackberry app generator (or something similar). Which was just a app generator packaging single RSS feed as an app.

Whoa, 47,000 * 100 == 4,700,000

But it was only for the 48 hour period of the portathon. And IIRC their total budget was only 2,000,000.

The Nokia App Wizard (now called the Xpress Web app builder[1]) was exactly the same. All it did was let you "app-ify" a website or a feed. There were LOADS of junk apps on the Ovi Store at the time built using this wizard.

It didn't help that a couple of the Nokia blogs were app-ified and presented as "Featured apps" on the Ovi Store -- these "apps" would shove the app builder branding in your face, which meant more people were aware of this tool and used it to build their own "apps".

I know why I ditched that ecosystem as soon as I had the means!

http://xpresswebapps.nokia.com/

Microsoft recently did the same thing called "Keep the Cash" or something similar. For every app you successfully submitted, they paid you 100 dollars(limit 10 per store).

I actually had a Microsoft engineer come to my school to do a workshop to promote this. It was done to show how to submit apps to the windows store, but the process involved using 3rd party software to create crappy whack a mole apps.

My class that day had about 20 people submit various whack a mole apps, most of which I know were successfully reviewed and approved. So we essentially got paid to attend a work shop while Microsoft got a nice boost in apps in their store.

I am not sure how widespread this promotion was, but I know my particular engineer that day said he had been to 3 or 4 other colleges in my area that month.

Also last I checked my wonderful whack a mole app had about 50 downloads. I am sorry to whoever downloaded that crap.

As a BlackBerry 10 developer, this is pretty bad. It pollutes the store with garbage apps like the Play Store. The difference with the Play Store is that there are enough good apps there that they rise above the noise. It seems like BlackBerry needs to work on getting more significant apps on the platform, and needs to work on filtering out crap like this.

I'm making what I consider to be "good" apps, but I'm just one dev. It's a really crappy problem of the fact that phones aren't selling due to lack of apps, which doesn't incentivize developers to create apps because there aren't many customers.

It's really an unfortunate problem to have that I don't have a good solution for them to get out of. It's a fantastic development platform, and a fantastic OS that really blows Android, Windows Phone, and even iOS out of the water in many ways.

I'm more excited for BlackBerry's future than ever, but I'm also more worried than ever. sigh

> I'm more excited for BlackBerry's future than ever, but I'm also more worried than ever.

What exactly do you think is exciting about BB's future (as a platform)?

According to discussions I've been reading about this [1], it seems that more than _half_ of the applications on BB App World come from just four developers: a staggering 67,500 apps.

[1] http://forums.crackberry.com/news-rumors-f40/one-app-develop...

Could it be that maybe there's some kind of quirk in the BB API that turns out to be conducive to developing BlackBerry apps in a declaritive fashion?

So like, what if you dump a bunch of API calls into a table, and then aggregate the varying permutations with a SQL query, and wrap it all up in appropriate XML markup, programatically, and the call each variant an "app"?

The reason I'm pondering this, is because I think Microsoft has a similar situation, where even something as trivial as an RSS feed might be counted among the "app" statistics:

http://www.itworld.com/software/369727/microsoft-updates-win...

...and then there's also Firefox OS to consider. Where do you draw the line between an "app" and somebody's crappy web page?

In the Ubuntu "App" Store, a good chunk of the content are simply PDF magazines. There's no other place to purchase them (eg a dedicated book store), so they got rolled into packages programattically and put into their own section of the store.

I imagine something similar could be going on with Blackberry -- wrapping content as an app.

That is a tricky line, indeed. Assuming http://photos.appleinsider.com/App%20Store%20Review%20Guidel... is the real deal, Apple tries to do it with the following rules:

2.20: Developers "spamming" the App Store with many versions of similar apps will be removed from the iOS Developer Program

12.4: Apps that are simply web clippings, content aggregators, or a collection of links, may be rejected

Notice the 'may' in that last clause.

Sadly, I don't think Apple enforces these guidelines very much — the top three (by number of apps) developers in the iOS App Store are [1]:

* Libriance Inc (2,100 apps): http://itunes.apple.com/artist/libriance-inc/id336845065?uo=...

* NTT Solmare (1,600 apps): http://itunes.apple.com/artist/ntt-solmare/id291585690?uo=5

* Tobit.Software (1,300 apps): http://itunes.apple.com/artist/tobit.software/id284971906?uo...

A lot of the apps for each of these companies are very similar or are basic web clips.

1 — Source: iTunes Enterprise Partner Feed dump from a month or so ago.

I immediately thought of this site/person:

http://www.cebeans.com/

If that was all done by one person (heck, even a few): impressive.

BlackBerry needs to seriously weed out the rubbish. Besides the fact that browsing App World is a nasty experience on my 9930 (sorting is the most awkward I've ever seen), finding something I'm actually looking for is nearly impossible. I always end up browsing on my laptop and then scanning the QR code to install.

It's not style, not the call quality or even battery life that really can make or break BB. It's the available applications. If they can't get rid of the hackish nonsense, not to mention the equally unhelpful "reviews", nothing will change.

I know BB is rushing to fill this gap, but quantity over quality will tarnish the brand and make App World a joke. It looks like it's already done a lot of damage.

Windows Phone has (had? Haven't used a while) the same problem. There are tons of the same apps which are basically just wrappers for the mobile version of a website (facebook, youtube etc.) in the marketplace.

I've heard the same about the Apple App store, not sure if Apple did anything to prevent that in the meantime.

Not sure if it should be prevented. In any case there will be more apps than anybody can browse manually, so all the app stores need good app discovery mechanisms anyway.

Just using UIWebView to mirror a mobile site will get your app rejected.

2.12 Apps that are not very useful, are simply web sites bundled as apps, or do not provide any lasting entertainment value may be rejected

Their $100 / app, up to 10 apps per developer account "Keep the Cash" promotion made that very popular. Nokia's DVLUP program rewards people for apps with high numbers of 5-star reviews, so there are a lot of developers swapping 5-star reviews of these junk apps.

I wonder if he/she pulls in significant revenue. How else would they be motivated to create 47,000 apps? Perhaps there are lesser app juggernauts on the Google Play and App Store as well.

I'm guessing it will be a decent sized company, but with one account to publish the apps.

Imagine trying to support that many apps?

They don't have to support the apps, only the ones that end up with traction, hence revenue. If all 47,000 became popular then that would be a nice problem to have!

RIM has been offering incentives for developing apps for their store, I'd guess a lot of these were just an attempt to cash in on that.

Do they have API for app submission ? looks like this guy have automated app creation/submission.

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