Observations of an iOS developer
I'm a engineering lead and iOS developer for a major social network. On top of my day job, I develop iOS applications in my spare-time.
For a short-time I was actually a RIM employee, via a Irish company that RIM acquired. Being a RIM employee at the time didn't seem like a very desirable proposition, however, it did help me develop a sweet spot for BlackBerry and its devices.
Management at my current company is not totally behind developing a BB10 native application, so I decided on a whim, to take some timeout and develop the application myself, with company support.
Z10 vs iPhone 5
I've been carrying the Z10 for about two weeks now, and these are my initial reactions:
- Build quality is nice, phone seems robust and less scratch prone as the iPhone 5.
- For me, phone is a little large (us European's tend to like smaller phones), especially a little wide. I think Apple got the size of the iPhone 5 just right.
- I've had no issues with battery life, its not been a concern for me.
- Love the red notification light.
- Mini-USB port is really nice, but I think its location on the side is poor. It makes the phone difficult to hold when tethered to a computer while developing/debugging.
- HDMI output makes no sense to me, in the age of wireless connections to displays. (Apple AirPlay, etc).
- An unlocked Z10 was easy to purchase. Reading North American based reviews, I find phones and carriers are so locked into each other, that often a review of a phone becomes a review of the carrier, Very strange. My carrier (Three Ireland), gives me unlimited calls, unlimited texts and unlimited data (15Gb/month fair use) for €20/month, with no contract.
BB10 vs iOS 6
I really like BB10. It felt very natural and an interesting cross between iOS and Android. The C++/QNX underpinnings are very exciting and for a v1.0 OS, BB10 shows remarkable stability and maturity. Seeing fixes (why are they via the carrier?) coming quickly is very re-assuring.
For me, the gestures came very quickly, so much so, when using iOS, I find myself swiping up from the home button!
The peek and flow, is brilliant and is a very real innovative step forward.
I was disappointed a little with the Mail application (mail integration within the Hub). Maybe, its just GMail playing up, but I found that things like unread counts would not sync, or not sync very quickly, in comparison to iOS.
This was also true when connecting to my work account via ActiveSync to Office 365. It was very off-putting to see the red flashing light on the phone when at my desk. Read the email on my Mac, and then 15 minutes later, still see the message as un-read on BB10's Hub. This is something that iOS gets rights, and with BlackBerry's focus on mail and messaging, I'm surprised that this element is not working correctly.
Any reviewer talking of BB10 app situation can't help but notice that the amount of quality native applications is in a pretty dire state right now on App World. But where reviewers see an issue, I as a mobile developer, see an opportunity.
I look forward to helping deliver some innovative, native, cascades applications to the BB10 platform.
I wish the App World store would indicate if an app is a Android port though, as in general these provided a poor user experience.
XCode vs Momentics
I have no love of Xcode. Ask any iOS or Mac developer, and you will get a chapter full of complaints about Apple's IDE with ease. There are two ways of looking at Momentics: comparing it with Xcode and comparing it with the previous suite of BlackBerry development tools.
While, I never developed for BlackBerry OS7 and below, I have heard horror stories about how difficult and un-intuitive it was. Certainly in that regard, Momentics is a big step forward.
Coming from Xcode, its hard to get excited about BlackBerry's IDE. Its competent certainly, but still feels very clunky to use. The "QML preview" panel refuses to work on a Macbook Pro Retina. The starting and deploying to a simulator is kinda slow. Switching between simulator (x86) and device (ARM) builds is a little clunky.
Momentics, is not off-putting, but it needs tons of work to be really appealing, especially to the legions of iOS developers out there that BlackBerry wants to attract to their platform.
In summary
Love where BlackBerry is taking BB10. Its in much better shape than I ever expected. Having had access previously to RIM's intranet, I can attest that the company has had some death march to get to BlackBerry BB10 to this stage. The road ahead is long, but the first step is groundbreaking.
For me, I'm back to carrying iPhone 5 as my daily driver. Why? Most of my friends in Dublin are carrying iOS devices, and the lure of iMessage (even with its cronic bugs) and FaceTime is just too much for me. With the Z10, I just felt that bit more isolated. No Path, no WhatsApp, no iMessage, no spotify apps.
Yes, the situation will improve over time. But right now BB10 does not offer me enough to abandon all those app eco-systems. Maybe if I knew someone on BBM, but I don't!
As a new BB10 developer, I'll be keeping a close eye on developments and when the time is right, I'll take a serious look at making a more permanent switch.
Re: Observations of an iOS developer
Fair estimate. What is up is coming out this month
Sent from my Z10 using Tapatalk 2
Re: Observations of an iOS developer
Thank you for the fair review :)