Most recently, the UAE joined the ranks of countries where App World is available. This is great news not only for BlackBerry users in that country, but also for bloggers and support forum moderators. BlackBerryCool alone gets one or two emails per week from someone in the UAE saying “why is BlackBerry App World not available in my country? Please fix this!”. It should be interesting to see what, if any, applications get banned from the UAE and what sort of restrictions are imposed on anyone who wants to distribute their app there. On a more optimistic note, perhaps we’ll see a surge in developers writing apps for UAE users and distributing them in App World.
Magmic has launched a new version of New York Times Crosswords for BlackBerry that features in-app payments for subscriptions. The app features a free week of daily puzzles and it’s free to download. There are also a variety of subscription services you can choose including one month, six month or one year subscription rates. As far as we can tell, this is the first app to use the BlackBerry Payment Service to provide subscriptions.
The New York Times Crosswords is the only officially licensed app and has an archive of over 4,000 classic puzzles as well as lets you participate in the Daily Puzzle. Other cool features include:
Send messages and compare your solve times with friends online
Compete against top players via the online leaderboards
Write in ‘pen’ or ‘pencil’
Solve puzzles on the grid or directly from the clues list
Automatic highlighting of related clues
Check or reveal letters, words or the entire puzzle
Magmic also let us know that while they have limited device support for launch, they’ll be spending this week back-filling device support so stay tuned. Your device should be supported very soon.
There’s an infographic going around that was created by OnlineSchools depicting the number of apps for each smartphone platform. What’s interesting about it is just how much they’ve underreported the BlackBerry app numbers, and how little those reporting on the infographic are scrutinizing it. According to the infographic, BlackBerry only has 2,779 apps.
It’s commonly understood in the software business that you don’t deploy on a Friday. The logic behind it is that if you deploy on a Friday and a bug makes it into the software, you don’t have anyone around on the weekend to deal with it. We’ve noticed that RIM tends to update its Featured category in App World on a Friday and it’s not clear why. The App World team at RIM, while they may have people working on the weekends, surely don’t have the same resources on a Saturday night as they would on a Tuesday morning. Also, a major implication of being featured is that your downloads will increase and there’s additional load on your servers if your app uses them. By deploying the featured apps on a Friday, you aren’t taking into consideration the companies that have to either pay overtime to have someone around to troubleshoot the server load, or answer the increase in support emails. Even if the company is just a one person shop, you’re potentially ruining weekends and that’s just not groovy.
Maybe this didn’t merit a post on its own but we’ve had a couple developers write in and ask that we put this up. Perhaps more developers are looking to the blogs to get changes made ever since that lone blogger garnered so much attention.
In previous videos of the PlayBook we never really got a good walkthrough of App World and it wasn’t really clear why. In discussions around the office we thought it might be because there were apps in there that weren’t announced, and RIM didn’t want people poking around and knowing about them. There’s also the possibility that App World on the PlayBook simply isn’t ready for public demos. In the above video we get a nice walkthrough of App World on the PlayBook, and while it looks great, it seems there’s still a few bugs. It’s not clear what version of the PlayBook the person in the video is running, and it could be an old version of App World as well. Nonetheless, this video gives you a good idea of what to expect.
The above shows some of the marketing requirements needed to submit to AT&T
Anyone who has a portfolio of apps and multiple sales channels knows the pain of submitting marketing assets. Whether it’s App World, Mobihand, AT&T, VCast or Rogers Mall, they all ask for their own ridiculous banner, splash and screenshot sizes. Many industries have benefited from clear standards, and the various app stores around the world need to come to an understanding of marketing standards as well. The computer peripheral market has benefited tremendously from adopting standards, so lets get the app stores on board with a set of standards as well; for everyone’s sake. Continue reading ‘The Need for Marketing Standards Across App Stores’
