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Sunday, October 16, 2011
There's a reason Blackberry (RIM) is losing marketshare...
There's a good reason that Blackberry (Research in Motion) is losing market share. A few years back, Blackberry was the business phone of choice. It had push email, a good contacts organizer, a good calendar, a really nice keyboard, and the hardware was rock solid. Today's smartphones don't depend on built-in business functionality. The App Stores fulfill that need. Users can choose from thousands of apps to perform nearly any task imaginable.
The thousands of apps you find in your favorite App Store are built by programmers. The Android and iPhone platforms attract good programmers. Android does this through the availability of high-quality, open source (free) programming tools that integrate seamlessly into the newest versions of the most popular Java development environments, like Eclipse and NetBeans. iPhone attracts Apple (IOS) programmers because Apple developers are loyal to Apple and iPhone is the only mobile platform for Apple.
There is nothing attractive about Blackberry app programming. The Blackberry technical support website is virtually devoid of any assistance for programmers. Useful documentation is difficult to find - and not all that useful after all, once you finally find it. The Blackberry programming tools are built for an ancient version of Eclipse - the tools might work in current Eclipse versions and in NetBeans, but if they do, there's no indication of that on the programmers section of Blackberry's website. The Blackberry device emulators (a "virtual Blackberry phone" that programmers can run on their computers to test their mobile apps as they program, before putting them on a real phone) are the slowest of any I've seen. This can easily double or even triple the time it takes to develop apps for Blackberry, which drives up the cost to develop an app.
As a result, the iPhone and Android App Stores have the best selection of free and low-cost apps, giving iPhone and Android based phones the best features. Blackberry's App World has less apps and on the average are 3 times more expensive. As this gap continues to widen, Blackberry will continue to forfeit it's market share.
The thousands of apps you find in your favorite App Store are built by programmers. The Android and iPhone platforms attract good programmers. Android does this through the availability of high-quality, open source (free) programming tools that integrate seamlessly into the newest versions of the most popular Java development environments, like Eclipse and NetBeans. iPhone attracts Apple (IOS) programmers because Apple developers are loyal to Apple and iPhone is the only mobile platform for Apple.
There is nothing attractive about Blackberry app programming. The Blackberry technical support website is virtually devoid of any assistance for programmers. Useful documentation is difficult to find - and not all that useful after all, once you finally find it. The Blackberry programming tools are built for an ancient version of Eclipse - the tools might work in current Eclipse versions and in NetBeans, but if they do, there's no indication of that on the programmers section of Blackberry's website. The Blackberry device emulators (a "virtual Blackberry phone" that programmers can run on their computers to test their mobile apps as they program, before putting them on a real phone) are the slowest of any I've seen. This can easily double or even triple the time it takes to develop apps for Blackberry, which drives up the cost to develop an app.
As a result, the iPhone and Android App Stores have the best selection of free and low-cost apps, giving iPhone and Android based phones the best features. Blackberry's App World has less apps and on the average are 3 times more expensive. As this gap continues to widen, Blackberry will continue to forfeit it's market share.
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