All that’s left for BlackBerry-maker RIM is to rearrange the deck chairs. After losing its smartphone market, its smartphone subscribers, and Wall Street, the Waterloo, Ontario handset company now sees its developers manning the lifeboats headed for Apple’s iOS. Coders say they’re tired of inconsistent interfaces and applications that just won’t work.
“You have to put your resources where the growth is,” Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur tells Bloomberg in an interview Monday.
Seesmic and other developers leaving RIM say they’re tired of jumping through hoops and dealing with expensive ‘gotchas.’
Where coders need to account for a touchscreen, thumbwheel and keyboard for RIM devices, Apple “scored big” by requiring developers support a touchscreen and a button, said political-oriented app developer Purple Forge Corporation.
Apple rates as the best app development platform while also having the least minefields that programmers must navigate, according to the report. With Apple, there are very few surprises, while with BlackBerry “there are immediately lots of gotchas across the board,” Purple Forge Corp. CEO Brian Hurley said.
For Seesmic’s Le Meur, RIM’s PlayBook tablet was the straw the broke the camel’s back. After his company’s application wouldn’t even load on the PlayBook, leaving RIM was a no-brainer. “To me it was like, ‘Whoa.’ BlackBerry isn’t even an option.”
Although the Bloomberg piece includes just three developer interviews, RIM has attracted only 35,000 apps to the BlackBerry, a fraction of the 425,000 available to Apple users.
The BlackBerry maker is quickly becoming hollowed-out. One wonders how long the skeleton can continue on.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
24 responses to “RIM Developers Jump Sinking Ship for Apple: “Blackberry Isn’t Even An Option””
This isn’t a major shocker, RIM is done!!!
-Chris
http://friendsofmac.net
RIM RIP
+1 it’s only a matter of time now.
scary times or a market sorting itself out? Hmm, I suppose when RIM drop dead we should all feel sorry for them, I’m thinking of all those people who have worked their nuts off over the years at RIM only to watch their baby get savaged to death. On the flip side though there’s a lot of really dumb mistakes that have brought them to this place (and it is inevitable – the end is a matter of months I think). Stupid mistakes compounded by a management that was caught laurel warming. Time and tide waits for no man.
Is a shame, BlackBerry was once The phone to own. Amazing what can happen in only 4 years if you don’t stay on top of what the consumer wants.
RIM is dying. They haven’t had an innovative phone in years. The Playbook has had a lukewarm reception, at best. Now BBM will lose its power to iMessage.
Unless they can essentially create an iPhone-like phone in the next 12 months, I don’t see them being anything by a shell of their former self in the years to come.
Fact. RIM perfected a push email and BBM but then for whatever reason that became the extent of their Research In Motion.
Oh well. Regardless if RIM ends up at the bottom of the smart phone ocean or not Basillie & Lazaridis will still eventually ride off into the sunset with their incompetencies richly rewarded. No need to feel sorry here folks.
OK guys, I am all for reporting the news, but cultofmac is starting to turn into the “drudge report” when it comes to making sure bad news about blackberry is posted on the front page every day, much in the same way drudge posts bad things about obama on the top front of his site every day to smeer obama. ;)
or the HuffPo, or Giz, or ….
The truth hurts I guess, eh, djrobsd?
It would have been interesting to see RIM buy WebOS to breath new life into their platform.
“For Seesmic’s Le Meur, RIM’s PlayBook tablet was the straw the broke the camel’s back. After his company’s application wouldn’t even load on the PlayBook, leaving RIM was a no-brainer. “To me it was like, ‘Whoa.’ BlackBerry isn’t even an option.””
I’m guessing Loic never actually even tried it since Seesmic web works fine on the PlayBook. Unless he was trying some other Seesmic offering that I’m unaware of in which case, if it was an app designed for the PlayBook I’d be looking at the developer to figure out why it wasn’t working, not the PlayBook lol.