[RazzBerry]

I found an article on Forbes where this guy Ewan Spence talks not so nicely about the BlackBerry.
In fact, one guys responds to him as follows:

Honestly the issue is not that developers do not want to make apps for blackberry, its that the experience of doing so is terrible. Take for example a recent app we made, Recipes by ingredients, it has seen great success on android, apple, windows 8, and even chrome. It was a terrible experience submitting it to blackberry. You hear them criticize apple however apples approval time was nothing compared to the 28 days it took to review our app on blackberry. In addition apple and android devices are plentiful and easy to test on. The z10 is impossible to find and it is a hard sell to get developers to spend $700 on a phone to test (Never trust a emulator) then go through terrible support and a long review process to get almost no support after you launch the product. The fact is the reason blackberry had to make android possible is that it is the ONLY way most developers would even waste there time. I love what the z10 represents and looks like but blackberry has bigger problems now then just hardware and software, there core business model is faltering as they do not know how to deal with developers who are trying to move units to consumers instead of just businesses.

Sincerely,

Wendell Adams
http://www.abmobileapps.com/

This reply as well as Ewan's "professional" opinion, really made me mad.
So you dev's tell me, is it really that hard to get BlackBerry to approve an app or is it that BlackBerry wants good apps and is being picky?
Would love to hear the guys and gals with lots of grey matter respond on this one!

[Suhailone]

would like to know this also tbh

[KermEd]

Yeah. It's Downright painful.

But

Apple - takes just as long, charges you 100 year for it.

Microsoft takes just as long. Charges you 100 year for it but has terrible app sales.

Google let you post immediately. But then it gets overrun with foreign spy ware. My Google Play apps aren't significant.

But yes, BlackBerry appworld, the submission process, vendor support - its extremely angering to deal with. I have several apps I've refused to bring to blackberry because everytime I try I get some cryptic rejection a month later.

Last I checked I had 8 big (for me) apps I fought with app team about - got tired, and just decided to pull blackberry support. Sometimes it's just not worth the pain for a free app.

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[mikeo007]

I found an article on Forbes where this guy Ewan Spence talks not so nicely about the BlackBerry.
In fact, one guys responds to him as follows:



This reply as well as Ewan's "professional" opinion, really made me mad.
So you dev's tell me, is it really that hard to get BlackBerry to approve an app or is it that BlackBerry wants good apps and is being picky?
Would love to hear the guys and gals with lots of grey matter respond on this one!

That sums up my experience pretty well. Apple's app store is much better to deal with, but as stated, they charge you $100 a year for it (Blackberry also used to charge until recently btw).

Google play is also much better, but the support isn't quite at the Apple level.

He's also right about the simulators being an absolute mess. If I didn't have a dev alpha, I wouldn't be developing for BB. After seeing how some of my port-a-thon apps behave on an actual device vs the simulator, I will never trust it again.

[frannip]

Hey MOD ... can we get a better title for this thread. I think it definitely warrants developer feedback in a way that should bring BBRY prying eyes into it as well. This is CRITICAL information for BBRY to have (in my opinion)

Thanks!!

[MyBackPacksGotJets]

i did get rid of the sdk and simulator after seeing how poorly the simulator ran(if at all). you guys wont be seeing a decent amount of apps anytime soon until that issue is dealt with. i dont see why you would get angry at the author OP, calm down

[Brandon Orr]

I made a very simple no frills app in February and it took over 3 weeks to show up. I don't know how that is in relation to Apple and Google since I've never developed for another platform, but 3 weeks is kind of a bummer. I haven't had to update my app at all because it's so simple, but I'm wondering how the update process works? Does it take just as long?

[mikeo007]

I submitted a new app on the weekend and it was approved in under 48 hours. I submitted an update to an old app at the same time, and it hasn't been approved yet. I think consistency is probably a big issue too.

[Brian Scheirer]

The quoted commenter makes some valid points. I would say frustrating more than painful but I've had better experiences (plus I do have some BB connections) than others have had.

As far as the simulator not running well, that's your computer not the simulator. Either your computer sucks and/or you don't have virtualization turned on (enabled within your BIOS). Don't go blaming BlackBerry because you are trying to dev on a piece of crap.

[MyBackPacksGotJets]

The quoted commenter makes some valid points. I would say frustrating more than painful but I've had better experiences (plus I do have some BB connections) than others have had.

As far as the simulator not running well, that's your computer not the simulator. Either your computer sucks and/or you don't have virtualization turned on (enabled within your BIOS). Don't go blaming BlackBerry because you are trying to dev on a piece of crap.

i didnt know dev work was for a group of elitists. if blackberry is serious about apps they need to put the tools in the hands of as many devs as possible. the android simulator runs fine on my machine and it also gives virtualization as an option which i dont use.

[Brian Scheirer]

I'm not being an elitist... I have a modern day $400 computer. And even BlackBerry has said to turn on virtualization for 1130% increase in performance. So again don't blame the simulator for you not using it correctly. Would you like a 1130% Performance Increase for your BlackBerry 10 Simulator? �BlackBerry Developer Blog

[KermEd]

Well, to Brians point, the system has a major impact.

I do have simulator bugs and can share some tips. If deploys keep failing say 3 out of 4 times (very common for AS3 developers) remove and resend your debug keys. Some debug keys cause a weird bug when the deploy tool sends an uninstall command.

As for a sim being slow, a better PC is the way to go. Forget android and iOS for a second, BBRY really is top of the line in terms of specs.

You can only benefit from a good laptop. I use a top of the line mythlogic laptop. But that's because I don't care what the requirements are, if you depend on a computer for a career - you better show it the same level of care

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[MasterOfBinary]

i didnt know dev work was for a group of elitists. if blackberry is serious about apps they need to put the tools in the hands of as many devs as possible. the android simulator runs fine on my machine and it also gives virtualization as an option which i dont use.

Interesting, because in my experience the Android emulator is so slow and laggy it's hardly usable. And for me, the BB simulator works perfectly - no lag at all. I'm using a $600 laptop with Windows. Although I did find it pretty laggy when I used it on Linux, I think partly because my graphics drivers were pretty crappy (open source drivers).

I will say though, deployment is pretty sketchy sometimes. I've figured out how to do it though, so it works fine for me now. But I think they really need to work on that.

[KermEd]

One thing I do love about android sim:

First up, on my laptop mac os X in vm, bb10 and android - no lag anywhere. They All cold boot in seconds.

But troubleshooting an Android user issue today

It was stupid simple to test. With Android Vm we can switch between Android OS versions with little effort. And I was able to replicate the problem stupid quick and narrow bit down to one os release. That would have been hard as heck for BBRY.

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[Mister-E]

As I have not yet developed for iOS or Android, my personal experience as a first time developer with BlackBerry is that the development team has done a great job. If it was not for the BlackBerry Jam World Tour, various webinars, and the Dev Alpha, I probably would not have developed my app.

The delays for app approval have been frustrating and inconsistent. However they have approved 100,000 apps over the last couple of months, so the slow approval time is not surprising. Also, if I had released my app much earlier, I would have avoided the rush of last minute submissions.

I wonder if developing for BB10 was a last minute decision made by this developer, or else he would have had a chance to obtain a Dev Alpha device, for free, for testing.

[mikeo007]

I'm not being an elitist... I have a modern day $400 computer. And even BlackBerry has said to turn on virtualization for 1130% increase in performance. So again don't blame the simulator for you not using it correctly. Would you like a 1130% Performance Increase for your BlackBerry 10 Simulator? �BlackBerry Developer Blog

To be fair, the simulator still runs poorly compared to simulators for other mobiles. But you are right that a good computer definitely alleviates some of the performance issues. The lack of some core features in the simulator is also a hindrance (no Adobe reader for example) but luckily having an actual device running full OS alleviates that problem for me.

There are other issues with the simulator software though, in that it doesn't perfectly reflect the software on the actual devices.

I can think of 2 specific examples that caused me problems recently.

One is lack of sound support. This is a huge PITA.

Second is a weird bug I encountered in webworks apps on the simulator that has to do with rounding numbers. The application I made ran perfectly in the simulator and in ripple. But when I loaded it on an actual device, there were some very strange rounding errors using identical data.

I will admit, I may have been a bit spoiled by developing for Microsoft for many years. Their tools are absolutely the best out there, bar none. Apple's tools are also good, but still not up to MS level.

I can definitely give blackberry credit for listening and improving though. For anyone that developed around the OS 4/5 timeframe, you can definitely see how much better things have gotten.

They're also improving review times from the looks of things, which is a welcome improvement.

Cutting out the developer fee was probably the #1 reason I started seriously developing for BB.

They just need to keep improving and not rest on their laurels.

[MasterOfBinary]

For sure nobody has better dev tools than MS. I plan to develop for WP if only for that reason.

[KermEd]

I don't like their yearly fees and attitude towards developers myself. But I did consider it at one point. (Microsoft)

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[mikeo007]

I don't like their yearly fees and attitude towards developers myself. But I did consider it at one point. (Microsoft)

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Really not a big fan of the fees myself either, but I see them as paying for better tools.
If you still have a college or uni domain email address, you could go the dreamspark route as well.

[KermEd]

True - I dont have one though. I just don't like try after you buy programs.

Also adobe is awesome that way as well. I received a lot of software for them by proving I was a student. And they didn't require an edu email (the uni's here don't provide them).

Ed

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[anon(153966)]

Not sure what title you wanted exactly. Albeit, I've made a change and hope it is suitable...

Hey MOD ... can we get a better title for this thread. I think it definitely warrants developer feedback in a way that should bring BBRY prying eyes into it as well. This is CRITICAL information for BBRY to have (in my opinion)

Thanks!!

[fritz_bautista]

Question, anyone please... can you folks improve the app ESPN, always take a while to load and sometimes gets stuck... please help.

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[KermEd]

Only espn can do that.

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