“You win. I concede defeat. I no longer want to attempt developing an app for the Playbook,” developer Jamie Murai blogs. “Are you happy now? Surely you must be. Considering how terribly designed the entire process is, from the registration right through to loading an app into the simulator, I can only assume that you are trying to drive developers away by inconveniencing them as much as humanly possible.”
“Having already developed apps for the iPhone and iPad, I had a little experience with the process of signing up for developer programs, and naturally I assumed that yours would be different, but fairly straight forward none the less,” Murai reports. “Well, you know what they say about making assumptions!”
Murai reports, “First, I had to fill out a form with my personal information. No big deal, pretty standard. I do, however, notice that although it is currently free to register with App World, in the future there will be a $200 USD charge. Now just in case you’ve never looked in to competing developer programs, Apple charges $99, and Google charges $25. Considering you are by far the underdog in this game, how do you justify charging double the price of the market leader? Also, with the $99 or $25 charge, Apple and Google let you publish and unlimited number of apps on their stores. You, on the other hand, have decided that for $200, a developer should only get to publish 10 apps, and it will cost $200 for every additional 10 apps. On Twitter, I believe that would colloquially be referred to as a fail.”
It gets much worse. Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Dead company walking (and praying for a takeover offer).
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]
Boom!
Head shot.
Face shot!
Money shot!! Ewww…
Godlike!
BLOODBATH!
RIM and Microsoft see corporate e-mail differently, so I don’t see the latter as a possible suitor, especially with Nokia in bed. Yahoo! likes to take over companies and run them into the ground further. But I would like to nominate Dell as a company that ought to buy RIM outright, if only for the QNX operating system.
LOL – the letter is hilarious – but sad.
They should have tossed their towel in with Nokia when they had a chance.
This is, however, a great lesson in human nature. You see, I bet all the RIM folks are thinking they have such a great and powerful and clever system.
Lesson: never underestimate the power of self-deception!
Wow.
Is RIM trying to go out of business?
Unfortunately, I think they’ve been trying for a long time.
I think this article hints at something that is pure conjecture, but might be based in reality- RIM is hiring fresh compsci grads who have no real-world experience. Any software developer and product manager worth his/her salt would not allow a development kit to be released like this.
How can management permit such a poor developer experience?
Holy crappy SDK Batman!
I don’t know about a takeover, but you guys were right about Palm…
If RIM is in 3rd place, it needs to be letting developers sign up for FREE…
I get the strong feeling, from the quotes I’ve heard straight from the CEO’s mouth, that RIM’s board and management are living in a haze outside reality.
Apple has set a very high bar and continues to raise it. I doubt RIM will be able to reach it.
In fact, Apple may do what no other company has done that I can remember, in that it may dominate with a supermajority the iPad product segment it popularized by simply upgrading everything so fast that competitors can NOT keep up.
Actually, RIM probably needs to “pull a Microsoft” and PAY developers in advance to write apps for PlayBook.
$200 to allow a single developer the ability to release 10 apps? That’s pretty bold. They’re going to be lucky if there are 10 apps from every developer combined.
the hard truth is RIM simply does not have the competency to write sophisticated software. they should have bought Palm and Web OS, that was their only hope. now instead they are going to be the next Palm.
RIM better make some moves to take over the Maylong 150 tablet manufacturer and learn coding from the Chinese because essentially developing for the RIM platform is about as easy as learning Chinese.
Plus the Maylong 150 is an actual working model unlike the vaporous Playbook. Or Playcock as I like to call it because of all the cock teasing talk the co-CEOs of RIM have been spewing lately about the enormity of the Playbook, etc, etc, yadda, yadda. Except it’s total shit.
Do you hear the sound of 1,000 toilets flushing up in Waterloo, Canada? That’s the sound of the Playbook slipping past the rim of the toilet bowl to be flushed like the piece of shit into the sewer lines.
Bye bye RIM. You missed the target by a country mile.
This reeks of ballmer T clown.
It is amazing how these companies just don’t get it.
Bad management, inexperienced developers and this destined to happen. As a RIM shareholder, it’s a shame to see them not even try.
I’m an developer and must admit there’s something to be said about placing a limit on the # of apps a developer can release to The App Store. If had enforced a limit I think we wouldn’t have so many spammy bible apps, etc…
If someone was going to purposefully sink the company from within, this SDK story would make an ideal method.
Never underestimate the dullness of corporate types – they represent one of the shallowest parts of the gene pool.
With their 1950’s ‘business suits’ and their racist/sexist/fascist tendencies well-hidden by fear of discovery, and their alarmingly dull lives, and their inability to be courageous, they really are a pox on the planet.
@derek in milan, WELL PUT!!!
Not included in the MDN excerpt:
The author lives in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada – hometown of RIM.
He is a student at the University of Waterloo – which has a well regarded computer program – and is well supported by contributions from RIM.
“Ouch” does not begin to cover RIM’s mistakes.
Warning! Empty your bladder and your mouth of liquid before reading this excerpt from the article!
“I thought this story would end there. Unfortunately, there was one more little jab you were still able to get in, RIM. This afternoon, Google Notifier informs me that I’ve received an email from you. Naturally, I assumed that it was just a confirmation that my App World account had been approved, considering I had filled out your forms truthfully and completely, just as you had asked. However, I was surprised to find that it was, in fact, a request for more personal information. You wanted me to print off a notarized statement of identification form, fill it out, take it to a notary with government issue ID to have it notarized, and then return it to you so that you could be absolutely sure with 100% accuracy that I was who I said I was. I think it goes without saying at this point, but neither Apple nor Google require you to do anything even close to that.”
HA!!! Good catch on that one! Are they insane?
Leeroy Jenkins!!
@ mdmac
Do you have something against the Bible, asshat?
I do.
People like you, people sort of like you, and people kinda like you.
He may be an asshat for any number of reasons.
But at least he knows how to use the reply feature which is one of the best bits of MDN’s migration to WordPress.
As for having stuff against the Bible, it’s not so much the book that’s the problem, it’s definitely the people who look at the words without understanding the true meaning or who use their interpretation to support their point of view.
As an example, take Israel (please): as a rational Jew, I don’t see how anyone can use a 2000-year old book of fables and parables as a set of divinely-ordained property deeds that entitle them to indulge in some pretty stupid behaviour. Of course, the same is true with Muslim extremists who twist their book to their ends.
As Richard Dawkins has argued: humans can be good or bad all on their own, but genuine evil seems to take religion as a catalyst or a justification.
This is my personal fav:
“Turns out, you’ve decided to put the .iso image in an installer, and just have the installer copy the .iso into a folder on my sytem.”
Ah yes, SO logical!
I love RIM’s response, now attached at the bottom of his blog post:
“We’ve been working on these issues [since the moment we read your blog] and they are valid concerns [why didn’t we notice these?] and we’ll have some updates soon [that probably still suck]”
Were you actually able to read it? It came out as dark gray(ish) text on an even darker background on my iPad. I started squinting to read it, but after a couple of paragraphs I decided it wasn’t worth it.