[Dunt Dunt Dunt]

Let's face it his JOB is to get BB10 launched and growing as a platform. To come out and say to investors that "hey we really don't have that many good apps and sales are no where near what we wanted", would have meant the end of any chance at BB10 becoming a 4th Platform. Big Corporations have rules that they have to follow, and good investors know what facts they have to guide them and that the "rest" is all just noise.

If you made a decision to invest in BBRY and didn't do your homework, didn't look at the official finiciancials of the company and believed all the "MARKETING" hype that Thor and company were feeding the press... that is on you as an investor, the only fraud was you believing that people don't embellish.


Way too many investors here on CrackBerry - it is a good place to get a feel for want is going on with users and devices, but a BAD place to get investing advise. There are to many emotional FANS that will say "I'm Long on BlackBerry no matter what" types around here!

[npunk42]

Any one of us would know that if one guy creates 7500 apps, something is wrong, and someone is getting mislead. If one guy creates 12,000 apps, it's a joke. 47,000? That could easily be a court case.

That just rips the guts out of Andoid and iOS app offerings. Check it out, its an industry wide practice. No secrets here.

[mset]

Good apps or not, the phone does everything I need for it to do. That's all that matters!!

Hard to be more wrong than this, from the point of view of an investor.

[neoberry99]

Hard to be more wrong than this, from the point of view of an investor.

I hear you but I'm not an investor. I'm just a consumer that enjoys using his blackberry. This news about apps, blah blah means nothing to me or my phone. My phone still works as good as it did day one

[Robert Halloran]

Who cares? I wouldn't care if all apps were made by one developer ... just get the apps! This is just another news article designed to create negativity towards Blackberry. Drive the SP down so we can snap this gem up for a song.

[SlcCorrado]

You are right, $84m is nonsense, but $10m or $20m is still horrible. Do you know how many good employees could have kept their jobs with that money?

Sure, if that was true.. But it's not

[mikeycollins13]

Let's face it his JOB is to get BB10 launched and growing as a platform. To come out and say to investors that "hey we really don't have that many good apps and sales are no where near what we wanted", would have meant the end of any chance at BB10 becoming a 4th Platform. Big Corporations have rules that they have to follow, and good investors know what facts they have to guide them and that the "rest" is all just noise.

If you made a decision to invest in BBRY and didn't do your homework, didn't look at the official finiciancials of the company and believed all the "MARKETING" hype that Thor and company were feeding the press... that is on you as an investor, the only fraud was you believing that people don't embellish.

Needing to push a platform out does not give you license to deceive investors and lie to pump your stock. That strategy belongs to penny stock boiler shops, not company's like Blackberry. Heins and senior management have disgraced this company with his behavior the last 6 months.

He has violated soo many SEC rules its hard to count.

[Dunt Dunt Dunt]

Needing to push a platform out does not give you license to deceive investors and lie to pump your stock. That strategy belongs to penny stock boiler shops, not company's like Blackberry. Heins and senior management have disgraced this company with his behavior the last 6 months.

He has violated soo many SEC rules its hard to count.

Deceive and Lie are too very differnt things, you can do one with out the other... legally anyway.

Did "they" lead people to believe something and allow them to jump to a conclusion? Or did they outright lie about something?

Devices were selling out at many retail location - that wasn't a lie. Sue they only had ten devices, but they sold those ten devices.
It was there best launch of a single BlackBerry device in many markets - that wasn't a lie. Whole reason they kept the launch out of the US.

Big business has nothing to do with what is right and honest or morale... you do understand that right?

[ricocan]

How is it different from Apple bragging about 800,000 apps in their app store, but failing to mention a lot of them are trash no one would want.

Agreed, it would be very interesting to compare this to what how things are done over at the iOS and Android App stores?

Ricocan

[Josh Brolin]

The only difference is ios has 100% of every app on the top 50/100/500/1000 list. Doesnt matter how many are nonsense.

[alexmach1]

It doesn't matter...Consumers were looking out for the apps they use, and whether they had 40000 apps, 120 000 or 1 million, it didn't matter cause they didn't have the apps that future buyers wanted!

If you invested based on the 120 000 app number, well very little research would tell you most key apps were missing!

[Josh Brolin]

It was tough to see people throw their hard earned money at bbry based on what the ceo said. His job was to turn around bbrys image, he did the best way he could. Guess he gambled thinking if he convinced people bbry was back they would go buy the z/q. All the realists like forbes actually researched bbry and saw what was happening. But like most of the realists said there is a slim chance bb10 would bring bbry back. It still isnt over but it looks like bbry as we know it will be dismantled.

[northernrds]

If you invested into BBRY strictly because BlackBerry stated they had 120,000 then I suggest you stop playing in the market and see a financial adviser to help you with your investments.

[SlcCorrado]

If you invested into BBRY strictly because BlackBerry stated they had 120,000 then I suggest you stop playing in the market and see a financial adviser to help you with your investments.

Haha, yeah! Thanks for that

[dracolnyte]

im pretty sure i read somewhere that there is a maximum you can earn from submitting your apps...

[edwinsberry]

Big business has nothing to do with what is right and honest or morale... you do understand that right?

Hmmm . . . kinda the whole point here isn't it?

[qcbarry25]

i would not go as far as defrauding investors, even though it is shady as hell. there are better example of Thors "defrauding" investors than their claims on apps, like best sold bb phone ever, expectation exceed, and other crap Thor said.

i think the consumers should be more mad than the investors. you hear wow 120k apps? it cant be that bad right. then you go into the app store and you find only a handful of useful one and now you found out half of its from one developer jacking up the number. now you are stuck with a 600 dollar phone.

[SlcCorrado]

im pretty sure i read somewhere that there is a maximum you can earn from submitting your apps...

20 apps max, I believe. Plus the 10k deal for built-for-bb apps

[lnichols]

I think that they have lied and defrauded investors on many things, but not this.

[offyoutoddle]

I think there was huge pressure to deliver a big number of apps. Huge.

Whatever happened it's out of the closet and in the open now. It's truly shocking. This is shareholder money here, pensioners in Canada who have been defrauded if this is true.

To intentionally produce fake apps to pump your stock is fraud.

To pay one developer millions of dollars to help you pump your stock is even worse.

quite a spin on the program to incentivise developers - particularly when it is open to all, and public. There is no conspiracy theory that ever holds water when you take a closer look. This one evaporates on even the most cursory examination.

[Blacklatino]

I disagree. Paying two developers to manufacture 60,000 apps that are totally junk, and then using that to claim ‘developers are embracing' your platform is outright fraud. Boiler room pump tactics.

Heins will have now alienated every single investor as this paints Blackberry's corporate ethos in very bad light.

This is so disappointing as the last thing this brand needed was another scandal after last earnings call.

Heins and co continue to trash this brand. Its sad.

It is the outing of blatant skuldugery that truly scares investors. What else have they done?

IDN, something about each of your post......can't put my finger on it- yet. Serious allegations being made. Have you reported this to, IDN..........news media? Really what do you have to gain from this....Caped Crusader? Even if you are right, WIIFY? Most ppl don't wake up and put on a Boy Scouts "moral compass badge" and post comments about "alleged" crimes that could lead to jail time......because they are bored.

[mikeo007]

A lot of misinformation floating around here. I'd suggest folks check out the main discussion thread on this topic to catch up: http://forums.crackberry.com/news-ru...-world-841408/

AG posted a few snippits from there earlier I see, but just to clarify a few things:

1. S4BB has a total of about 48,000 apps on BB world. Of these apps, approximately 47,000 are BB10 apps (out of ~120,000 BB10 apps). This is where the ~40% number is coming from.

2. The port-a-thon rewards were only payable up to a maximum of $2000 per developer. This was exploited by some developers to receive additional rewards (see AG's earlier post) but S4BB's vast amount of apps would not have been paid beyond the $2000 maximum.

3. The Built for BB program is a single $10,000 reward paid to a developer who creates a BFBB app that generates at least $1000 in revenue with at least 100 unique downloads. Developers are only eligible to receive this payout once.

Now, for my opinion on Heins involvement in this: of course he didn't directly decide to defraud people by accepting these 47,000 garbage applications. Heins fault lies in the likely incentives that were promised to executives for securing a certain number of applications for the platform. If there's someone to blame for this disgrace, or someone to investigate for a potential scandal, it would be the executives in charge of securing and processing these apps.

[mset]

1. S4BB has a total of about 48,000 apps on BB world. Of these apps, approximately 47,000 are BB10 apps (out of ~120,000 BB10 apps). This is where the ~40% number is coming from.

2. The port-a-thon rewards were only payable up to a maximum of $2000 per developer. This was exploited by some developers to receive additional rewards (see AG's earlier post) but S4BB's vast amount of apps would not have been paid beyond the $2000 maximum.

Thanks for the information. Since you seem to know, let me ask you this. Someone pointed out that for one person or team to complete this many apps, they would have to be outputting at a huge rate, maybe hundreds per day. Obviously one person can't do this. What is the incentive for a business person or dev to hire enough people to complete this taks over a long period of time, if he's not getting paid for the programming? Surely these 47,000 apps aren't generating enough in sales (given that they're crap that was just meant to pump the numbers) to allow them to meet costs?

[mikeo007]

Thanks for the information. Since you seem to know, let me ask you this. Someone pointed out that for one person or team to complete this many apps, they would have to be outputting at a huge rate, maybe hundreds per day. Obviously one person can't do this. What is the incentive for a business person or dev to hire enough people to complete this taks over a long period of time, if he's not getting paid for the programming? Surely these 47,000 apps aren't generating enough in sales (given that they're crap that was just meant to pump the numbers) to allow them to meet costs?

In all honesty, the creation of most of these terrible apps could be automated quite easily. The submission to BB World, however, cannot. And as has already been stated, the submission process does take some time. If I had to guess, I would say this developer has been submitting BB10 apps for about 9 months, so just prior to BB10 launch. That's about 150 apps per day, which would take a single person an easy 8-12 hours per day just to submit to submit (based on 3-5 minutes per submission)..

For the life of me, I can't see the logic in their business model. I could not see a way for them to make any monetary gain based on their current junk dumping techniques.

So back to (what I assume is) your original question: Could a deal have been put in place between Blackberry and this developer to pump up the numbers? Absolutely plausible. Do I think it happened? Well, if you had asked me a month or two ago, my answer would have been: "Absolutely not, I believe that they have more integrity than that".

Asking me now, after this news, Blackberry's response, and some other conversations I've recently seen/had with Blackberry dev relations, my answer is now "it's possible..." interpret that how you will.

[mset]

For the life of me, I can't see the logic in their business model. I could not see a way for them to make any monetary gain based on their current junk dumping techniques.

So back to (what I assume is) your original question: Could a deal have been put in place between Blackberry and this developer to pump up the numbers? Absolutely plausible. Do I think it happened? Well, if you had asked me a month or two ago, my answer would have been: "Absolutely not, I believe that they have more integrity than that".

Thanks a lot for the response. It will be very interesting to see how all of this shakes out and what the actual story is.

I guess that implicit in my question is another question about the possibility of a deal between this dev and BBRY to pump up the numbers. Really though, I was just wondering about the possibility that there's a business model of which I'm unaware, something that would make this worthwhile from a legit business perspective for a dev (I'm not a software guy at all so I just wouldn't have known about the automation thing).

It's just so ridiculous to me to find out that this happened. I am guessing that nothing like this has happened in the AAPL or Android ecosystem (that is, I assume that there are devs that have a lot of apps on those platforms, but by 'a lot', we are talking about hundreds max). Please correct me if I'm wrong, and there is a single dev that has flooded either the AAPL or Android stores with tens of thousands of bogus apps.