RIM is going to amazing lengths in order to ensure that its platform gets a fair share of mobile apps. The canadian giant has been holding a spree of Port-A-Thon events, the most recent of which are the two held over the weekend, focusing on Blackberry 10 community and porting Android apps to the Blackberry platforms. According to a tweet made by Alec Saunders, the Vice President for Developer relations at RIM on Twitter, the Port-A-Thon hit a milestone of 15000 apps in 37.5 hours – while the event was planned for 36 hours, the devs sat for an extra hour and a half specifically to hit this target of 15000 apps. Among the rewards was the sure shot reward of $100 if an app got approved to the Blackberry app store. Apart from cash, the hardware being doled out included a PlayBook tablet being promised to those who wrote two to five apps. Whats more, if you were able to submit more than five apps, you’d get a chance to receive the Blackberry 10 Dev Alpha device and those who managed more than ten were offered a free trip to the Blackberry Jam Europe. If you start counting the kind of investments that the company is making into awarding developers, which include giving out hard cash in return for apps – the total amount would turn out to be of the order of several million dollars. The concept of holding Port-a-thons has been quite successful for RIM, due to which it has been able to rake in a lot of apps that are ported to Blackberry 10 from Android in a short time. Since the developers do not need to start from scratch, the process usually takes a comparatively shorter time. While this has raised concerns about the quality of apps being degraded, Alec Saunders has replied that he has absolutely no worries about this fact – adding that he expects to have a good mix of apps when the platform is launched in the market and that they are ensuring that ultimately the user experience turns out to be excellent.
