

Blackberry to give $10,000 incentive to build apps(with conditions) - frankydp
http://crackberry.com/certified-quality-apps-coming-blackberry-app-world-along-10000-incentive-build-them

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megablast
Screw this, just make it easy to setup up your damn SDK. I tried twice, once
earlier this year when it was supposed to be easy, and no luck.

I got Android dev working and Xcode (which was too easy!). I have done J2ME
dev in the old days. Come on RIM< get your act together.

~~~
canadiancreed
I had similar difficulty with their SDK in early 2010, back when BB was still
a force in the market. Nothing makes developing more fun then you're entire
IDE crashing, closing, and deleting all non-saved data. Getting it setup
wasn't too bad (it still had some quirks), keeping it running was a bloody
hassle.

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dangero
They say the app has to generate at least $1000 on its own which means this is
meaningless for free apps.

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joezydeco
So publish an app for $100 and pay 10 friends to buy it? You'd still profit
$9,000.

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jm4
Who knows 10 people who have a Blackberry?

If I was in school, out of work or otherwise had a lot of free time on my
hands I might take a stab at it. It would be low risk. There probably isn't
much competition out there so it would be easy to get noticed if you're quick
to market. Maybe you could scrape together $1000 in sales. I can't help but
think it will lead to quick and dirty, low quality apps and sloppy ports, if
anything at all.

For anyone who has to make a more difficult choice about how to spend their
time I can't see how this platform is even remotely appealing. The handsets
are crap. The OS is old and busted. You can't even depend on consistent input
methods between handsets. There's absolutely no buzz around anything RIM does
these days. The only time I ever see them mentioned in the news it's another
story about layoffs, how far they've fallen or both.

WP7 looks much more appealing than this. There are some slick looking phones,
a mostly nice looking OS and I've actually seen them out in the wild. Still,
even WP7 is a distant third place behind iOS and Android.

RIM would be irresponsible not to try this. They have to at least show a
willingness to try to stay in business. They desperately need developers and
they still have some cash. I can't think of a better way to entice developers.
Unfortunately, this is too little too late. The time for this was back when
Blackberry App World was first released.

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joezydeco
_"Who knows 10 people who have a Blackberry?"_

Touche.

~~~
jm4
At first, my intent was to be snarky, but it's really the truth. I can't
remember the last time I saw someone using a Blackberry. My last friend with
one got rid of hers months ago. She was the only person I knew with one for
quite a while. I had one several years ago and loved it, but they haven't
improved much since then and everyone else has.

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TamDenholm
I was recently working in an agency on a blackberry promotional project and
while i was a good 8-9 degrees of abstraction away from RIM (which in itself
created problems) it was quite clear they're WAY behind other phone companies
and are frantically trying to claw back some ground but finding it hard
because certain "partners" are now refusing to get involved with Blackberry
projects.

I really think Blackberry's days are numbered no matter how much money they
throw at the problem.

~~~
vibrunazo
> it was quite clear they're WAY behind other phone companies

Could you expand on that? I don't know much about RIM, would be interesting to
learn why are they taking to so long to catch up.

~~~
excuse-me
When they were the darling of corporate email they weren't interested in
having outside developers.

Then when the iPhone came out they made a half-hearted effort to attract devs
but there was no app store and to sign up you had to jump through the sort of
hoops that a supplier of space shuttle avionics to Nasa would expect.

Then just when they had the sign up and an app store working they made an
announcement something like - "it's all going to change with our wonderful new
OS but we can't say at the moment how you will program it or if your old apps
will be compatible" - at which point most devs looked at their market share
and compared it with the number of customers on iPhone and Android and
uninstalled the SDK.

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vibrunazo
Also note that blackberry is offering tools to easily repackage Android apps
to their new OS. [1] Together with the $10k combo, this is a very interesting
proposal that me and my co-founder are seriously considering and studying it.

Has anyone here used the android to blackberry tools and could share your
experience with it?

[1] <https://bdsc.webapps.blackberry.com/android/>

~~~
sjk413
I have attempted to port my app
([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sjwindsurf...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sjwindsurf.android.windfreakfree))
using eclipse back when the Playbook had just come out, RIM were offering a
Playbook to anyone who submitted an application to App World. I was very busy
at the time, but attempted to port my app across (WindFreak), as it was
supposed to be quick and painless. It basically didn't work at all.

It would get to the loading stage in the virtual Playbook, and crash every
time, no real way of debugging it (not that I could find). It might have been
due to the complexity of my app, and at the time there was no list of
compatible functionality. I gave up after wasting 1 day on this. It might be
easier to accomplish now.

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dyeje
I've only heard terrible things from other people about BlackBerry dev.
Specifically, that there were numerous issues porting. Does anyone have any
experience to the contrary? What is the BlackBerry user base like at this
point anyway?

~~~
gravitronic
I ported my SDL/C++ DJ app DJPad from HP TouchPad to Android, and then to
PlayBook. It took less than a week to do the port and on the first day of
sales, it outsold 2 months of Android sales in a single day and continues to
outsell Android by about 2 to 1.

Without any press it did about $300+/day for the first 3-4 days, then drifted
down to about $30/day where it is still selling at that rate a month and a
half later.

I also got a free PlayBook out of the deal as it was during a "write a new app
for BlackBerry and we ship you a free PlayBook" offer.

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eli
Seems more like just a nice bonus for people who were already planning to
release a moderately successful commercial app for Blackberry. And RIM doesn't
care about people creating free or ad-supported apps?

~~~
vibrunazo
I don't think it's a matter of they not caring. But how would they support it
without giving room for fraud? Their certificate only goes so far, the $1k
limit just sounds like an easy way to make sure that the app is indeed
reasonably good and has a real market. If they tried to support free apps, it
would be much harder for them to make sure.

~~~
eli
By making the threshold $1000 or 1000 downloads (or 5000 downloads, whatever)?

Really, they should be reaching out to developers who already have successful
apps on other platforms and convincing them to port. But maybe that's
happening also behind the scenes.

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dravidan
The new cascades sdk is awesome, and is available for mac, win and linux !

~~~
markus2012
What's the workflow like?

2 years ago I abandoned BlackBerry because of the soul crushing edit/test
cycle.

Testing code changes required pushing the new code up to the BB JVM, which
required rebooting the emulator.

It ... took ... forever ...

~~~
dravidan
yea, i know. it is completely new, not related to BB java. QT like development
and c++. The simulator is a vmware image like playbook dev.

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jeffdechambeau
It's desperate but it's also the right move. If I were them I'd give devs 100%
or revenue from apps too. Anything to get market share at this point.

