

Ask HN: what's it like to develop on Blackberry, vs say Android/iOS? - zxcvvcxz

I&#x27;ve heard that perhaps BB is inferior to Android&#x2F;iOS for app developers, and would like to know why exactly this is the case from your experiences.
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nirajd
I would agree that the Blackberry experience for app developers is indeed
inferior to that of Android and iOS.

Here are my observations:

The Blackberry Vendor Portal.

1\. App submission An absolutely dated interface for submitting applications.
One thing that really upsets me is that Blackberry did not segregate the
interface for pre-BB10 applications and BB10 applications. Throughout the
submission process, I was constantly given the option to submit my
Cascades/BB10 application as a pre-BB10 bundle. Even after I submitted my
application as a BB10 application, I was given reports that someone had
downloaded my application on their pre-BB10 device. How could this happen?

2\. Viewing reports Again, a dated interface for viewing reports. Reports are
only produced on-demand either as a ZIP file of CSVs or a static GIF that
looks like it was exported with excel. I could imagine those who rely on BB
apps as a source of income have written excel applications to process this
data into a user-friendly format. Both iOS and Android have reports in
beautiful charted format directly in their app portal.

3\. Responding to users I had a review on my applications in which the
reviewer was requesting a feature. I did have this feature in my application,
but due to a ux flaw, it was not easily recognizable. I would have loved to
drop the user a comment notifying them of this feature. Regardless of
denying/approving the review, I think this is a fantastic feature in the
Android (Google Play) model.

iOS and Android app portals are built for the common developer. As they are
built for the common consumer. Blackberry vendor portal is built for the
enterprise, very much like their original phones.

4\. I would consider myself a "Qt/QML expert", so from a programming
standpoint, I find it much easier to convert complex UI designs into working
code. This is thanks to the wonderful Cascades framework with QML syntax
(originally built by The Astonishing Tribe, acquired by BB a few years ago). I
think it's much easier to deploy code with BB compared to iOS/Android. This is
of course dependent on the developer.

5\. Blackberry, prior to releasing the Z10 in the US, released an "Application
Generator". This generator converted RSS feeds into running, "native"
applications for BB10. This flooded the BB10 app world with garbage
applications. There are still hundreds of applications on the store that are
blatant rip-offs of Android applications (search Maps on your Z10 and you will
see several GMaps rebundles)

6\. App services like advertisements and push notifications are still not up
to par as iAd or Admob, and APNS.

------
deft
Disclaimer: I've never developed for iOS or Android.

Honestly I think Developing for BlackBerry is actually pretty good. The other
commenter makes good points about the vendor portal and responding to users,
but the actual tools for development are great. There are so many options on
what programming language to use, and the API documentation is pretty good. I
don't know what it was like pre BB10, but I'm pretty sure it is a lot better
now. They still have things to work on but I wouldn't say it is inferior to
iOS/Android.

