We’re here at BlackBerry DevCon and Mike Lazaridis as well as Alec Saunders are on stage to talk about some cool things we can expect from App World, as well as the general developer community, in the coming months. Some things to expect include a better developer portal, enterprise apps, and more outreach from RIM to the developer community. There’s a lot going on and while we’re not sure exactly when this stuff is available, it’s great to see it’s coming. More after the break.
Continue reading ‘Mike Lazaridis and Alec Saunders Talk App World and Developer Community #BBDevCon’
Tag: blackberry app world
BlackBerry App World 3.0 is now live in the Beta Zone and the updates and features seem to be centered around the new social APIs and supporting apps that use in-app purchasing and virtual goods. Something we would like to be seeing from App World is a coupon system and affiliate program. It’s surprising how long App World has been around and there’s still no affiliate program. With an affiliate program, BlackBerry would be better positioned as a platform for app discovery tools such as Appsfire, Heyzap and Chomp. A coupon system would also help with giveaways and would position App World as a great platform to blog about.
Here are the new features of App World 3.0:
Continue reading ‘BlackBerry App World 3.0 Now Available in Beta Zone’
Have you checked whether or not your app is being pirated? A development shop recently reached out to BBCool to say that they’ve noticed a particular Mobihand user that has been purchasing their software and then posting the JAD files on his website and Twitter. This software pirate is from Malaysia and sells a $10 VIP membership to offset the cost of buying the apps. According to the developer it’s getting really bad and the download rate for pirates apps is 2 to 1 compared to paid, and it’s all coming from this one guy. Obviously, we’re not going to write the pirate specifically because we don’t want to drive any traffic to him.
We’ve been on a tirade against Mobihand lately and this is just one more reason we don’t think developers should be giving them their intellectual property. When speaking with developers, the general consensus seems to be that only 10% or so of sales comes from Mobihand and the rest from App World. The reason why developers are staying with Mobihand these days seems to be because they want a closer relationship with the bloggers and giveways through Mobihand make it easy to reach out to the community. But if only 10% of your revenue is coming from Mobihand, you should consider simply finding other ways to reach out to the community. Sure, App World has its downsides, but if your software is being pirated then it’s worth losing that 10% revenue and finding a new way to market alongside bloggers. Gift cards are an easy giveaway as they can be sent remotely.
Continue reading ‘Developers: Maybe It’s Time to Drop Mobihand Entirely’
BlackBerry App World 3.0 beta is coming soon and the App World team has announced 1 billion downloads over the past 2 years. BlackBerry App World is now in over 100 countries with an average of 3 million downloads per day. Once App World has support for Android apps, we’re going to see a huge surge in app downloads as users will have more content to discover.
App World 3.0 is about to go live and it looks like RIM has updated the desktop App World site. App World 3.0 doesn’t seem to have anything all that new from the consumer side, but does help developers with larger image submissions (for PlayBook), as well as other description changes in the vendor portal. The desktop redesign is really awesome though and has a more “zen” feel to it. As you can see from the screenshot, or heading there yourself, the site has a featured carousel as well as smaller carousels with the Top Free, Top Paid and Newest items. Perhaps the homescreen of the app version of App World should be designed this way too.
It really seems like apps sell devices these days. Whether or not it’s true from the retail side of things, it’s definitely true from a media perspective. Much of RIM’s chagrin is due to the perception that developers aren’t interested in the platform because a lot of the latest apps are choosing iPhone first in terms of what to develop for. RIM needs some bold moves to help make it big in the app economy and here are 5 things we’d like to see.
1. Give every new BlackBerry customer $10 for App World – We’ve experienced it countless times. You find someone with a BlackBerry and they go “oh, I didn’t know I could get apps on this.” One of the easy ways RIM could teach everyone about apps and get people hooked on App World, is to give every new customer a $10 gift certificate for App World. Once they spend $10 and get an understanding of the value, they’ll be hooked. Developers everywhere would benefit from this.
Continue reading ’5 Ways RIM Can Improve the App Ecosystem’
