21–30 of 48 posts
Gah. The corporate-speak vocabulary obliterates any sincerity that may have been been in that letter when it was conceived. It reads like nothing more than "damage control".
As someone who has worked on both sides of the table (i've looked after developer relations and I'm a developer) credit should be given for the fact that this response was internally agreed, written and published during a weekend. I think the RIM response was great given the timing and don't be too quick to decide it fell short given that the people who would need to be involved in any change to their policies probab…
I can't help myself thinking of a saying: Losers always whine about their best. Winners go home and fuck the prom queen.
Some one is creating work for themselves inside RIM. Instead of here's a file to DL, and some docs - it is "don't we want to grab some personal info?"; instead of "Push your apps here", someone has decided to put in another yak to shave. If in doubt, just try to get some thing on the developers machine as quickly as possible.
The blackberry eco-system is to a certain extent based on trust. But the trust is backed by accountability. Every piece of code that runs has to be signed by RIM† using your personal signing key. That way if somebody writes an app that does something bad, they know exactly who is to blame.
It is kind of the opposite of Apple's walled garden approach, but it achieves the same goal - that end users can trust the software from dodgy third party devs like you and me. In Apple's case it is because they 'carefully' cough vet the apps. In RIM's case it is because they will come down on you like a ton of bricks (wrapped in legal weasels) if you do anything dodgy.
†This applies even for you writing and testing code on your own device. You have to send the code to RIM who sign it and munge it up with their 7 secret herbs and spices and then they send you back a binary file that is what you actually install.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed the company I used to work for would be never capable of such a feat. 1. They would take at least a month to notice (if at all), 2. Nobody would go to write an actual response, 3. The customer would be flagged as "that pedantic asshole", 4. Any internal dissenters who would notice the whole deal would be ignored or coerced into obedience. Oh and not to mention that said organization has immense illusions of gr…
Please note that this isn't an over the weekend spur of the moment thing, these are complaints that people have been making loudly for months. Your company with the one month time to notice and make a response is actually responding 5 times faster than RIM in this instance . Scary eh?
Don't get me wrong - I see RIM as going the same way as NOKIA (read: nowhere fast). But to their credit - they were able to get an actual product to the market and get to where they can fall deep :).
While I'm glad to see RIM respond to Jamie's post, they didn't address the ridiculous cost of the developer program. It boils down to $20/app. I suspect the iPad will continue to dominate this year as more android developers gear up for honeycomb. Where does that really leave the playbook. Specs are great, but apps sell hardware.
Just to clarify it's not $20/app - it's $20/app AND every update to that app. It's $20/submission. I heard from developer relations that the fee has been waved for the moment. RIM also used to want $2K/year for HTTP access over BIS. I've heard this has been waved (but docs are still up saying this is a benefit of membership: https://partners.blackberry.com/web/guest/access-to-blackber... )
They are essentially applying a financial penalty to iterative development. Unbelievable.
Patching your app? $20 please.
While I'm glad to see RIM respond to Jamie's post, they didn't address the ridiculous cost of the developer program. It boils down to $20/app. I suspect the iPad will continue to dominate this year as more android developers gear up for honeycomb. Where does that really leave the playbook. Specs are great, but apps sell hardware.
Cost is $0 currently and most likely will remain that way unless RIM somehow recaptures number one spot (not gona happen).
All it does is make developers nervous that they might be locked into paying money in the future. Just do like Google and charge developers a token fee (to verify identity and intent, I'm guessing) right from the beginning.
If the goal is to lower the barriers to developer adoption, a $25 fee isn't going to stop anyone like the threat of a $200 fee in the future will.
Meh. Why develop for RIM? They don't have any market share, and they're not easier to work with than Apple (or the runner-up, Google). They're even behind #3, Palm/HP. They haven't shipped, and I don't have any idea when they will. I read the tech press pretty much every day, and I have no idea when this is supposed to be. I assume this year? If you're working on a RIM app, I'm asking you: why? I am honestly curious.…
(including that funny country selector thing - why do I have to do this again? I don't need to do this when I visit apple.com) This is a really good point - GeoIP is almost guaranteed to be accurate enough to determine country of origin now. We should no longer have to deal with that crap.
Meh. Why develop for RIM? They don't have any market share, and they're not easier to work with than Apple (or the runner-up, Google). They're even behind #3, Palm/HP. They haven't shipped, and I don't have any idea when they will. I read the tech press pretty much every day, and I have no idea when this is supposed to be. I assume this year? If you're working on a RIM app, I'm asking you: why? I am honestly curious.…
(including that funny country selector thing - why do I have to do this again? I don't need to do this when I visit apple.com) This is a really good point - GeoIP is almost guaranteed to be accurate enough to determine country of origin now. We should no longer have to deal with that crap.
No. No no no. Please don't do that. I know everybody does, but it's such a terrible idea. If you rely on geographical location to set language, you're ignoring travelers, expats, regions with multiple languages, etc.
Look at my browser's Accept-Language header. Go with that. It's almost certainly what I want. If you have a really good reason to serve me content based on my location, use GeoIP to determine that. Never ever use it for language. And make it really easy to change both.
1. Yes - great, they replied publicly. While others may have complained before, at least they're finally replying in public.
2. "Suggestions like his are critical in helping us improve our products and processes". Why should things ever be as remotely bad to start with as what the OP was describing? Downloading an installer program that just copies an ISO to a folder? SDK and Simulator only available as separate downloads? Repeated data entry on multiple screens? Does no one at RIM sit down before things are released and say "OK, let's test this end to end and see if it really makes sense."?
Again - great that they responded, but having multiple poor experiences rolled up together gives the impression that RIM just really doesn't care that much, and can't be bothered to make the process for developers remotely straightforward.