[larrytxeast]

Maybe this has been asked before, and I'm way behind, but I'm noticing a HUGE amount of organizations writing iPhone apps for their cause or company, but almost never writing one for the Blackberry OS or the Android OS. Why?

Frankly, I'm tiring of it. I'm starting to contact these companies and telling them that I refuse to do business with them or support their cause if they continue to be such iPhone idolaters.

Not to fret, this is not another post from a Blackberry poster threatening to leave Blackberry for iPhone. Not at all. I love my Bold 9000 and know it's capable of a lot. If anything, I'm standing up for my device and saying--hey, it's about time you companies support it too.

There is NO WAY the iPhone's sales are that resounding, nor the device's capability so resounding vs what other devices can do, so as to explain this. The Blackberry OS is very predominant, the Motorola Droid (and now the Droid X) and such phones as the HTC Ultimate (if I got the name correct) are all very capable and large sellers in their own right. It thus makes absolutely no sense whatsoever for these organizations to only write apps for the iPhone platform.

What gives?

[tye dye]

I agree . From what I've been reading on here it seems like most people just don't want to work around ( or with ) RIM services . Would love to see the other post on this .

Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com

[LakerStar25]

I agree. But if you look at most the apps that they have for the iphone/ipod its a bunch of useless apps that aren't even worth looking at. They just put out apps as much as possible to say that they have so many. I think that the apps that Rim/Android have are ones people actually use and want.

[SeanBest]

I believe i read somewhere at one point that roughly 40% of the iPhone apps were junk apps, like fart apps and what not.

[thegame9e]

I believe i read somewhere at one point that roughly 40% of the iPhone apps were junk apps, like fart apps and what not.

I strongly agree with this because there are many apps for blackberry, you just have to know where to find them. Iphone has a lot of apps but how many people are really going to use every single one? I really think they should exclude the apps that are junk, like the farting apps and what not to see where they seriously stand! One thing is for sure though, blackberry users do NOT have to worry about a death grip! haha

[decypher44]

My issue isn't just the number of apps, but cost. BlackBerry apps seem to be 3-5 times the cost of similar iPhone apps.

[Victor878787]

The problem is that developing for blackberry is 3-4 times harder than any other platform. Blackberry really needs to improve the development experience before it can really become mass market like apple.

On top of that the platform is really crappy when it comes to 3rd party apps. All the apps have to be installed in memory and not stored on flash.. This is really poor design and most likely just a left over of an OLD os that RIM is just trying to keep alive.

Because of this when an app is larger than 1MB on BB, everyone flips out and says why is this so big, but if you look at most iphone apps, they are huge in comparison (many megabytes). It takes alot of memory to make really nice rich interfaces, and BB users just dont have the resources YET.. Newer devices have been better about it, but its still not there and the user perception of app size still has not changed.

[trjnberry]

Don't forget that the Ipod Touch uses the Iphone OS, so all those apps that are not restrictive to a phone use, can be used by Ipod Touch users. That opens a huge market of potential buyers. So, I'd imagine that you have all these apps for the Iphone because even BlackBerry users can use those apps if they have an ipod Touch, or now, an Ipad. There is no BlackBerry tablet or ipod that people use and likewise with Android. Once either platform comes out with a tablet or some other device that non-platform phone users can use, then you're likely to see more apps avail for Iphone OS than BB or Android. Apple very shrewdly made the Iphone OS the OS for their Ipod Touches. I am not sure about Ipad, but I do believe the Iphone OS also works on that too, so developers are playing to significantly larger market than just BlackBerry or Android. The economic law of supply and demand dictates a low price for Iphone apps because developers have potentially millions of users to sell to versus a much smaller market for specific models of BlackBerry and Android.

[SCrid2000]

Also, if I remember corrctly, RIM charges developers a hefty fee so that they can sign their apps to make them install on a BlackBerry. This leads to less developers pursuing BlackBerry programing.
And of course, remember that iPhone is the "cool" phone - advertising and clever marketing by apple laid that in stone years ago. Reality doesn't matter, regardless of anything else, most smartphone users have been socialized into believing iPhones are cooler.

Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com

[phone9]

It does cost more to start up and continue developing for BlackBerry, but if you do a halfway-decent job you make that back soon enough.

iPhone is an Apple product, conceived and promoted by a charismatic genius of a leader and innovator with a long-time cult following, who usually ensures that the quality and usability of what he markets is superior and ahead of its time. iPhone also "got there first" with pushing the app-craze concept. Those IMO are the reasons why it's the king of apps, just as the Apple ][ was made a mass hit by the amount of 3rd-party software that was so easily written for it. IBM followed with the PC which was inferior in many ways but eventually took over due to dominance of the business sector, and people wanted the same thing for personal use that they were used to at the office. Eventually even more software was written for the PC than had been written for the Apple. We'll see if RIM can pull an IBM on Apple, but probably after the bitterness of losing dominance of the personal computer market he invented, Steve has learned how not to make the same mistake twice.

[larrytxeast]

My apologies--I forgot to include the Nokia Symbian OS in this discussion. I would say Windows Mobile too, but I don't seem to hear much from that camp lately.

I am a free market person, seriously, but I am THIS close to advocating that it should be legally MANDATED that these organizations MUST write their applications for Blackberry, Android, Symbian etc and not just iPhone unless they can convincingly argue how only the iPhone could properly execute it. Irrespective of start-up costs etc they should be REQUIRED to support Blackberry, Android, Symbian etc users rather than catering to iPhone users exclusively like they're God or something.

But if that happened, it wouldn't stop there & the govt intervention would spread in other realms where we would most definitely NOT welcome their intrusion. So never mind.

But as a free market person I can contact these organizations etc & state emphatically I will refuse to do business with them in any facet based strictly on this 1 thing. It really is that big of a deal to me strictly on the principle of the thing.

I really appreciate how Bolt, Opera, Google and others aren't doing this & support the Blackberry OS--as well they SHOULD, given how predominant it is. The rest, I feel, are guilty of Apple idolatry.

LRH

Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com

[webmastir]

as a big app user, i'll be moving to android becuase of this alone. sucks but just the way it is..

[SCrid2000]

I've actually only seen two apps for iphone/android that I really would like that I can't get on BlackBerry. My buddy has a sweet backround check app on his iPhone (although realistically you can do that easily online). My buddy with a droid has the app I really want, it's an augmented reality game and it's freaking sick. I wish there was such a thing for BlackBerry...
Other than that, I haven't seen too much that really impressed me. Some games (which I mostly don't care about) and, like was mentioned, apps like iFart and iBeer.

[webmastir]

oh that's all most of you iPhone wanabe haters can hate on is the iFart stuff. yes, of course there's a stupid amount of those, but that is just a speck of what's really availble for that platform.

every bb app, almost every one, is lacking in so many ways. since i'm such a heavy google user, it sucks getting shafted on their junky BB apps, imo. so it only makes sense to move to android platform. that & i'ma heavy CLI user, so it'll be nice to have that on my mobile phone too. it can vary person to person depending on your needs, but i find android apps to FAR FAR outweigh BB apps hands down, with the exception of a select few

[ridesno159]

What hasn't been mentioned is the huge amount of duplicate apps for the iPhone. I'd be interested in knowing how many apps the iTunes store has once all the redundant ones are removed.

Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com

[andiamo]

Really, really long post. Tl;dr is that RIM's development environment is less than stellar. I'm a BlackBerry developer myself, and while I do enjoy it, it's nowhere as developer-friendly as Android.

Also, if I remember corrctly, RIM charges developers a hefty fee so that they can sign their apps to make them install on a BlackBerry.

Funnily enough, RIM only charges you $20 for a signing key. Apple, meanwhile, charges you $100 a year for access to their Developer Site (which you need to download XCode, sign apps, and submit to the App Store). On top of that, you can only develop on a Mac. So for me, it was easier to pay $20 to RIM than to pay $999 for a Macbook + $100/year for a subscription.

The simple reason is that the iPhone is just a more popular phone among the "app using" demographic. Though RIM still leads in smartphone marketshare in the US (barely), many are corporate users who do not or can not install 3rd party apps on their phones, much less games or entertainment apps. The iPhone got very big, very fast, and it's a great platform for releasing games, since every iPhone has a built-in graphics accelerator that lets it handle decent 3d graphics as well as animations, and on top of that, there are none of the space issues that BlackBerry's have. On top of all this, the iPhone has a centralized app store, which is the ONLY place you can get apps from. Sure, RIM has the App World, but it doesn't come preinstalled on some phones and they don't market it well at all so many people don't even know it exists.

It's just more attractive to a company like EA for them to release a game on iPhone than on BlackBerry, since it will probably be easier to develop, easier to market, and easier to distribute, resulting in a cheaper development process and more sales.

Plus, once you get past the initial cost (I haven't), the development environment on iPhone is better than that of BlackBerry. Documentation is better, the tools are better and easier to work with, and it's much, much easier to make your app look good on iPhone.

Android, while not as popular as the iPhone, has managed to attract more apps than BlackBerry in a much shorter time because it has some of the features I mentioned above. The Android Market is a centralized app store that is preinstalled on the device and fairly heavily marketed by carriers such as Verizon, and some Android phones have graphics accelerators allowing for good looking 3d games. The development tools are nearly the same as BlackBerry's, though perhaps slightly more polished (RIM has gotten better recently, but they are still lagging).

I have most experience as a BlackBerry developer, so I can offer input as to why many developers are NOT writing apps for BlackBerry. In no particular order, I'll just list a few of the problems.

-App World sucks. It's not preinstalled on many phones, and in fact most BlackBerry users (those who aren't visiting forums like CB) don't even know it exists. RIM doesn't market it very much, and on top of that they charge ridiculous fees to submit your app ($200 for 10 submissions. Rejections take away from your credit, as do updates to existing apps). That makes it more difficult for small developers such as myself to get their apps out there. I've relied mostly on forums like CrackBerry and search engine optimization, but with my app appealing to a niche market anyway it's very difficult for me to get exposure, and I'm certainly not paying $200 to get on an app store that isn't used by many BlackBerry users.
-UI (user interface) development on BlackBerry is more difficult than it should be. iPhone and Android both make it easy to design and implement a UI that looks good. With BlackBerry, unless you want your app to look like the Settings menu on the phone (black and white, with the occasional blue highlight), you need to write a lot of custom code to make your UI look half-decent. My app, Mango, doesn't deviate too dramatically from the default UI look, and yet the amount of custom UI code I had to write is ridiculous. And animations, like fading in/out or sliding? The default BlackBerry UI components don't support these, so you need to pull off tons of clever annoying hacks and tricks to get them to function, even sloppily. And that brings me to my next point.
-BlackBerry phones are underpowered. BlackBerry devices typically have small amounts of RAM, no graphics acceleration (some phones like the Storm series have processors capable of graphics acceleration, but for a long time, developers had no way to access it!), and weak processors. On top of this, everything, including the OS, is running through the Java VM interpreter, which runs slower than native compiled code such as that used by iPhone apps or the Android OS (Android apps use interpreted code, but the OS is native). This means that things like games and UI animations will often not perform well unless serious optimizations are made to the drawing code, and the OS even has trouble doing some graphics-heavy things itself. Again going back to my app, which has a screen allowing the user to pan around a large image (handled entirely by the OS, I wrote no code for the image panning), on a Storm with inertial scrolling the panning animation is very slow and choppy, simply because the processor cannot handle redrawing the image more than once or twice per second. RIM cheats in the default image viewer by using native code, which allows it to run faster since it's not being interpreted by the Java VM.
-Development tools are not polished. RIM has gotten much better about this, but there's still room for improvement. When I started coding for BlackBerry about a year ago, the development tools and plugins were a royal pain to set up, requiring you to download 10 different things in a specific order configured just right. There would be tons of posts on the official developer forums with people asking for help with just setting up the development environment! Once you were set up, the tools themselves (I personally used Eclipse with the BlackBerry Java Development plugin) were not well polished or developer-friendly. Signing apps required a couple of extra steps, and to simply make an app available for OTA downloads you would need to do some surgery on the .cod file the plugin generated.
-Network connections are a PITA to get working on all carriers. This is my biggest problem by far. Some users, especially those in Indonesia, will simply not be able to connect to the internet using my app. There is no consistent way to connect to the internet from a 3rd party app. It's not as simple as "request some data from the internet," as you need to tell the OS how you want to do this as well. Using WiFi? Using Wap2? Using custom APN settings? Using Direct TCP? Using a specific service book entry? Using Public BIS? All of these options work on some carriers and not others, and the only one that is guaranteed to consistently work is Public BIS. Unfortunately, to use Public BIS, you need to subscribe to BlackBerry Alliance, which is $2000 a year. Yeah, okay, sure.

With this all said, I still do enjoy working with BlackBerry development, but it certainly has it's issues. I have since moved on to an Android phone for actual daily use, however, and RIM will need to make big changes if they want to keep their top spot (which will be gone before long if they don't do something, quick).