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No it's not. 30% cut off the top of each sale of the app and $20 for posting and updating.... It's no wonder Blackberry apps are more expensive. In the end you get an overpriced app that looks like crap because of the limited OS it runs on, but it's OK because it's a "Super App" that can tie into different APIs to do stuff on the phone, which apparently RIM thinks no other platform can do that.
What's even more amazing is that they're actually selling this BS to people and they buy it like lemmings. Double
Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com05-04-10 11:56 PM - I quite agree with that. Which reminds me of another point I had, myself and some other developers were looking over the "Super App Challenge" RIM introduced at WES.
This is from their site describing a "Super App"
Wait, what? So you're using examples of apps developed by RIM in house with programmers who know the OS better than anyone and have access to unreleased APIs and information. Great.BlackBerry smartphone email, instant messaging and BlackBerry� Messenger are great examples of Super Apps that demonstrate many of the characteristics above.
Facebook� for BlackBerry� smartphones and MySpace� for BlackBerry� smartphones also demonstrate what’s possible with alerting, native app integration, social connectivity and more.
That also brings me to another point that I didnt mention earlier. In my opinion RIM does not care about independent developers. By independent developers I mean people like myself who work by themselves to create apps and are not part of a major company. Now to back it up...
First, the $20 to post/update an app fee, even for free apps. While this may not be a big deal to a company like EA who posts games on AW, it is to me. A perfect example is another developer (I wont mention his name but he's free to post here) has about 20 applications on AW that are all based on the same premise so they share some common code. He recently discovered a small bug, which was caused by a bug in certain OSs released officially by some carriers. So from no fault of his own he now has to update his applications and pay $20 each to update. That is $400 out of his own pocket.
Second, support. AW is full of bugs, many frustrating the customer purchasing the app, whether it be try & buy not working, old versions being downloading to the customer, apps not showing as being purchased etc... RIM is supposed to handle these support requests for the customer, and by now many of these issues should have been resolved. But beyond that many of these support requests fall upon the developer to resolve. So for an app that I might make $2.50 profit on, I may spend 30 minutes of my time just getting the customer the app they paid for.
Third, leaving the small devs/non "alliance" members last/out of the loop. This one is going to be a little hard to describe, but Ill use an example of something that I recently came across while working on a new app. There are many primary APIs that you would think RIM would open up to developers, simple things that just can't be done. The example Im referring to here is with the keyboard backlight control. Just like bedside mode or the build in media player does, turns off the keyboard lights. Guess what, with the public API we can't do that. But heres the interesting part Garmin Mobile for the BB does it. So why for something so basic does RIM not make this public and selectively choose who its available to?
I could go on and on, but I'll leave my rant at that for now
But to conclude, have a look in the Mobihand/CB app store, youll find the overwhelming majority of app are by independent developers. RIM should be embracing us not pushing us away. Guess what (I actually just found out this morning talking to him), one of the devs of one of the top selling BB apps both here and on AW just switched to the Incredible. What does that say?05-05-10 06:20 PM - Shao128, don't hate on the RIM Super Apps... after all, the best example of a RIM Super App is the native Phone App which CAN'T even add someone's number from the Call Log to anything else other then the "Work" field in Contacts. lol
I think I might make some bumper stickers that say "My Super App does less then your Regular App..."
05-05-10 09:11 PM
