Alec Saunders, RIM’s VP of Developer Relations was just on stage here at BlackBerry World announcing a wealth of new updates for their developer community.
One of the announcements that really caught my attention was regarding quality applications. Alec is on record as a being a huge fan of quality applications — by this, he means apps that actually add value.
If you look at a lot of the apps out there, the vast majority are pretty rubbish.
With this in mind, RIM is putting it’s money where it’s mouth is. The company wants to see more quality apps submitted to their app store — and, provided developers meet a minimum set of quality requirements, RIM will guarantee minimum annual earnings of $10,000.
As long as your quality app makes $1,000 in download earnings in a year, RIM will write you a check for the balance if you haven’t hit the $10,000 mark.
This is a serious commitment. It’s likely to appeal to a lot of independent quality app developers.
It’s a rather graceful way of helping stimulate and fill the ‘app gap’ too. Rather than paying developers to create unproven apps, RIM is helping reward success. So basically, if your app is half decent, you’ll get rewarded.
I’m not quite clear on the whole list of minimum requirements — however there should be more details revealed shortly.
Find out more at developer.blackberry.com.
I guess that part of the thinking here is that it takes some of the risk away for developing a BB app – it will help to push a few developers that were unsure into creating a BB app.
Ewan, the problem for us with RIM, apart from the multitude of versions, devices and lack of App world on their devices, has been how to make our fermium model work as well as it currently works on Apple and Android and therefore continue with product investment. RIM need to make the mobile app experience and in-app purchasing as seamless as it is in iTunes and Google.
cheers
andy
HulloMail
Have you talked to them recently Andy?
These are the issues we experience daily! Nothing biz dev can do about that 😉 We need RIM to make an impact before getting too excited. As an app developer we’ve always been on the bleeding edge and bled when it came to RIM. This is the coal face experience. Currently and we see it on a daily basis our user base is either migrating to an iPhone or Android and new signups that were once more or less evenly split we see BB as negligible. On the revenue side we make more from our advertising on Android alone than any RIM related revenue.
I am all for what RIM are about to do. However before jumping up and down we need to see results. Apple and Android conferences don’t tend to hand out devices left right and centre. Right now in todays climate we follow what the numbers tell us.
What we are experiencing reminds me of the good old days when we had, dos, windows, unix, OS9, Mac. I can’t help but look at history and what the market told us then.
Its become a two horse race Apple/Android with the others becoming niche if they can recover – niche is not bad.
Good perspective Andy!
So I can make an app and buy a $1,000 worth and then collect $9,000 from RIM, not a bad deal. I’ll need Ronie Mund as a gauge for my ugly meter app.