“Research In Motion Ltd., struggling to compete in the smartphone market with Apple Inc. and Google Inc., is losing support among some software developers who have been making programs for the company’s BlackBerry,” Devin Banerjee and Hugo Miller report for Bloomberg.
“Seesmic Inc., a developer of social-media applications, and Mobile Roadie LLC, which makes apps for fans of the Miami Dolphins and country singer Taylor Swift, have decided to stop making products for RIM,” Banerjee and Miller report. “Purple Forge Corp., which makes programs for political campaigns and polling, will stop building BlackBerry versions of its apps unless customers request it.”
Banerjee and Miller report, “The developers are stepping back from BlackBerry because they say creating apps is too complex and costly for the size of the market. RIM’s devices have different screens sizes, varied operating systems and several ways to navigate, from a physical keyboard to touchscreen to a scroll button… ‘In deploying Apple applications, there are very few surprises,’ said Purple Forge CEO Brian Hurley. ‘In Android, there are increasingly more surprises. But in BlackBerry, there are immediately lots of gotchas across the board.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: RIM. Busy dying since 2007.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Brawndo Drinker” and Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]
Wait. RIM had developers?
Two.
Those who aren’t busy being born are busy dying!
Yes, both of them.
Blackberry soon to be known as Prune-berry. LOL! Yup, flushing the developers out of the system and circling the bowl.
I was thinking more like Dingleberry.
Look for HP to be snagging up / bailing out RIM within the next year or so.
HP has that which was Palm. That has some chance of success.
Leave RIM for Microsoft. MS loves to go in all directions at once, and doing a poor job of all of it.
More likely to be Dell, but Dell’s problem is that it would be highly leveraged for it to buy RIM.
When an object exceeds its inertial momentum it will keep on going until arrested by a force acting in the opposite direction. RIM has been gripped by the forces of gravity too strong for it to resist and is rapidly swirling to the bottom of the pit.
Many factors are converging to ensure its swift demise: fragmented phone lineup, old archaic BBOS, outdated design, lack of clear irresistible leadership at the top echelon of the company. The confluence of all the negatives are conspiring to drive developers away from a BB Market that’s falling faster than a rock dropped off the side of Mount Everest. Only a miracle of Ballmer’s largesse can save RIM now.
With all these people getting laid off at Blackberry, there will even less RIM jobs…
OUCH!
Truth hurts.
Amateur hour is almost over.
There were apps for the Blackberry? Who knew?
Awesome… Enjoy the breath of fresh air, guys!
Is this really a big deal? A few developers of some low distribution apps are dropping RIM from their list. THe market size of RIM is still huge, however the market size for those SPECIFIC APPS is small and not worth it. I think MDN’s take is a little biased in this case.
The numbers that these developers are mentioning are quite telling: 20:1 (iOS vs. BBOS). Not to mention the very objective and real issue of fragmentation (screen size, scroll wheel/no wheel, touch screen/no touch, navigation buttons/no buttons, etc). Regardless of the size of the company and popularity of their software, these issues are very obvious.
Have you been notified yet whether your rim job is safe?
Add an ‘a’ to ‘defecting’ and you’ll get an idea of what RIM’s management is doing….
I use to have a BlackBerry back in the day, when the iPhone came out I forgot about the hardware keyboard. My girlfriend loves her BB, and defends it’s keyboard but to me the iPhone is the way to go. Had a stint with Android and found it buggy, and the apps weren’t as good.
RIM will be bankrupt or bought in a hostile takeover in less than 12 months. PALM folded like a house of cards after the PRE fiascos. They both followed the same path – over spending on R&D trying to play catch up + over spending by building inventory no one wants. The coffers are drying up, investors are selling, layoffs are starting, developers are jumping ship … the writing is on the wall.
Poor RIM. They continue to pour marketing money into their happy-shiny-smiley ads for their wannabe pad that nobody wants. It’s literally like watching them cut their own throats, pouring their blood out on television for everyone to see. Gross. I’m not cleaning up that mess!