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You win, RIM (An open letter to RIM's developer relations)

blog.jamiemurai.com

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Re: You win, RIM (An open letter to RIM's developer relations)

#61

Post by jammur »

lallysingh wrote: post #57
jammur wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a question of whether you CAN make it work, but whether you should have to. RIM is in competition for developers with Apple and Google. Why would a developer choose to go with RIM when the experience is much better elsewhere. I think we can all agree that apps are one of the things that will make or break a smartphone platform in the current market conditions. If RIM can't attract talented developers to writ…

RIM's got two nice advantages to it: (1) Employers often pay for the BB, and the data plan. You're getting access to a lot of users who wouldn't otherwise be customers in the smartphone arena. (2) As the phones are already part of the business's primary operations, you have some nice opportunities to sell apps that integrate with the business. Considering that RIM's product isn't even out the door yet, and the specif…

I'm not sure the first advantage really makes a difference though. Corporate users are not buying a lot of apps. This is shown in the latest market share data, where the App Store took in $769 million in revenue, with RIM App World in second place with only $36 million. This is especially significant because RIM has a similar smartphone market share as Apple. So you've got two companies with similar market shares, and one is doing 21 times the app revenue than the other.

The 2nd point is definitely valid, but it's a niche market. I'm not saying ALL developers would abandon RIM, but just that most would. I don't think a major player in the smartphone market can afford to only go after a niche market.

I agree that a lot of the stuff I mentioned is small. But a lot of small problems add up to a big problem. It's well known in the development community that Apple and Google have superiors SDKs in terms of ease of use, as well as tools and APIs. With the Android growth explosion, they will have a much bigger app market, and Apple will probably have the most profitable market for some time to come because Apple customers have demonstrated their willingness to spend money. RIM is going to have to really up their game if they want to lure some of the talented developers away from the other platforms.

Re: You win, RIM (An open letter to RIM's developer relations)

#62

Post by celticjames »

veeti wrote: post #26

"Knowing what a pleasure it is to use Apple and Google’s tools," I haven't used the iOS SDK, but the Android SDK is far from "a pleasure to use". The 3.0 emulator is so unusably slow that it makes it practically impossible for me to adapt my app to the new tablet UI without going insane in the process.

The Android emulator is a full ARM processor emulator. Very slow and probably always will be. My experience is that Android development is mostly impossible without the real hardware. This Android x86 port looks promising though: http://www.android-x86.org/documents/virtualboxhowto

Re: You win, RIM (An open letter to RIM's developer relations)

#64

Post by TillE »

celticjames wrote: post #62
veeti wrote: post #26

"Knowing what a pleasure it is to use Apple and Google’s tools," I haven't used the iOS SDK, but the Android SDK is far from "a pleasure to use". The 3.0 emulator is so unusably slow that it makes it practically impossible for me to adapt my app to the new tablet UI without going insane in the process.

The Android emulator is a full ARM processor emulator. Very slow and probably always will be. My experience is that Android development is mostly impossible without the real hardware. This Android x86 port looks promising though: http://www.android-x86.org/documents/virtualboxhowto

Yeah, I'm really hoping that they switch over to x86 for the emulator soon, the way Apple does it. It's not awful for simple apps, but it is genuinely impossible to develop an OpenGL ES application on the Android emulator.

Use a real device, and the whole process is quite painless.

Re: You win, RIM (An open letter to RIM's developer relations)

#65

Post by DrewHintz »

The simulator in the BB SDK reloads the BB OS every time you run an app. This lead to a 60+ second delay every time I updated the app and wanted to run or debug it. I gave up and thankfully someone else wrote the app: http://code.google.com/p/google-authenticator/source/browse/...

Disclaimer: I work for a possible competitor.

Re: You win, RIM (An open letter to RIM's developer relations)

#66

Post by zmmmmm »

celticjames wrote: post #62
veeti wrote: post #26

"Knowing what a pleasure it is to use Apple and Google’s tools," I haven't used the iOS SDK, but the Android SDK is far from "a pleasure to use". The 3.0 emulator is so unusably slow that it makes it practically impossible for me to adapt my app to the new tablet UI without going insane in the process.

The Android emulator is a full ARM processor emulator. Very slow and probably always will be. My experience is that Android development is mostly impossible without the real hardware. This Android x86 port looks promising though: http://www.android-x86.org/documents/virtualboxhowto

I've been using android-x86 for most of my development lately.

But is there a honeycomb variant yet? The best I've been able to do reliably is Froyo.

Re: You win, RIM (An open letter to RIM's developer relations)

#68

Post by foobarbazetc »

RIM is a very developer hostile company, and they definitely don't care.

Most of the listed issues still exist for "legacy" BlackBerry development, plus about 100 other things that we could go into (e.g., still no way to do HTTP without having to worry about 6000 different connectivity methods and managing them all is up to each and every app).

Re: You win, RIM (An open letter to RIM's developer relations)

#69

Post by jarek »

Locke1689 wrote: post #32
jarek wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the requirement to get VMware Fusion Mac-specific? Might as well complain about not being able to write iOS applications on Windows.

Until RIM makes its own desktop operating system I don't think it's comparable at all. And, once again, iOS is the market leader. They get to be different. RIM doesn't.

Except iPhone OS was also different back when Symbian was the market leader and Blackberry was the #2. People complained then. It still rose.

Re: You win, RIM (An open letter to RIM's developer relations)

#70

Post by laujen »

lallysingh wrote: post #49
btipling wrote: post #9

The complaints are: $200 price to develop with 10 app limit. Multiple registration forms. Requiring multiple downloads. Requiring to purchase vmware fusion. Installer that just copies an iso. Having to password protect the simulator. Bad documentation on how to load an app on the simulator. The comparative ease with which you can do these things with android and ios.

Honestly as an ex-indie PalmOS developer, I'm having trouble being sympathetic. I don't do blackberry myself, and don't have any particular affection for RIM, but this is just a little much. As I understand, RIM's gonna do all the fulfillment & billing for you in the app store? This is the SDK for an unreleased product? On a new, unreleased OS? On a different architecture than your dev machine? Yeah, it may require s…

As an old Palm OS developer and someone who wrote code for BlackBerry OS, I can tell you that BlackBerry is much much much much worse than Palm OS ever was.
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