Why Blackberry is falling out of favour as a platform to develop on. Hint: it's not just because they are losing marketshare.
As a long time Blackberry user, shareholder, and someone who has built two mobile companies which for years had Blackberry at the top of the development priority list, this is a painful blog post to write. And it’s not simply out of loyalty to another Canadian tech company. I have recently swapped my BB 9900 for an iPhone 4S and my platform development allegiances are not far behind.
Although RIM’s once iconic Blackberry devices have bled market share in the US – falling from 24% of the smartphone market to 9% in a single year – Blackberry devices still enjoy massive penetration in the enterprise, and particularly in the Public Sector. For a company focused on enterprise mobility, we’re far from being able to ignore the Blackberry OS the way B2C companies such as Rovio and Zynga are wont to do. The issue is this: the Blackberry Java SDK is at the end of its life. The next round of Blackberry 10 devices, now projected to launch in the second half of 2012, will no longer support these Java apps. Whereas by all counts we will be happy to begin developing native Blackberry apps in Webworks rather than J2ME, the quandary is: what is the justification for mobile product company to invest in its BB OS 7 apps between now and then? Or worse, as an enterprise IT department, would you invest in building (or licensing) BB apps that run on OS 7 or less?
I’ll leave that question as rhetorical, but what you’re likely to see is a massive de-investment in Blackberry application development. No point putting resources into the old platform. Wait and see how sales go before developing for the new platform.
This spells disaster for RIM, since nowadays mobile companies are only as strong as their ecosystems. Let’s hope RIM’s co-CEOs have a rabbit up their sleeves or the OS 10 cross-over will turn into a final justification for enterprises to move onto Android or iOS devices.