So what sort of engine is used, because there is lot of WebKit out there on devices and across manufactures and platforms where does the browser you have stand?
It is a WebKit browser. We had acquired a company 3-4 years ago, called Torch Mobile, which had a WebKit implementation, so we largely build our WebKit implementation based on that, it is a leading engine, well respected, and services and ranks very high.
How large is your developer base in India and how do beginners get connected to them in terms of development?
I can tell you that India has the largest base of developers to just give you an idea of our investment here. We have three teams based in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore that are focused on connecting to developers in all kind of ways. A couple of weeks ago, you may have heard about BlackBerry Jam Hack. It was APAC-wide 40-hour hackathon happening simultaneously across five cities. Two of these cities were in India. India is the only country where we usually do more than one of anything. You may go back historically, in July we had very successful global BlackBerry 10 jam to bring BlackBerry 10 across developers in the world. This was held in 26 countries across all continents, the only continent we didn’t go to was Antarctica. India was the only country which had two of these events, one in Delhi and one in Bangalore, both events were sold out, we had over 360 developers in Bangalore and in Delhi over 250. This last week we had over 180 developers who stayed the weekend from Friday to Sunday to build hundreds of BlackBerry 20 applications and we had picked a winner in Bangalore and similarly in Delhi we had over 150 developers who stayed weekend to build the BlackBerry 10 apps. Lots of developers were happy that we did this, of course we want to go beyond this cities because like we have a developer engaged model and groups that are preparing to launch in various cities like Mysore they are starting to launch more activates.
[do action=”inside-quote”]We have seen a lot of good quality applications being built in HTML 5 and the barrier has been reduced. I think BlackBerry 10 will be the showcase for that.[/do]
So I think community wise we have a lot of work to do and India is a very big developer base for us. I think we are just scratching the surface. We see a lot of interest from developers in BlackBerry 10 and we have actually launched a store a week ago, October 10 was official launching for our app world to accept BlackBerry 10 applications. We have seen a number of submissions coming from Indian developers, they are really keen and they don’t want to be left behind for BlackBerry 10 and the opportunity for them to make for India and globally, so they are very keen to be the first movers in the space.
How do developers submit apps and get familiar with the process?
The process is very simple. In fact, it’s the easiest compared to any platform, there’s no fee to register as a developer. You simply go to the website and register. All you need is an email address to get a vendor account. Once you have registered for an account, build your applications, and submit your applications. It usually takes about a week to get application tested and verified. We make sure that the app follows all the rules and regulations in our app guidelines or else we don’t allow the app. These are pretty basic guidelines. Once the application is approved, you are notified within a week after which you can go in and post it for sale. This would then be publicly available for the whole world.
A vendor can control things like pricing, for different country. For example, assume an app is sold for Rs. 37 in India. With different purchasing power across different markets, a developer can sell the same app for $1.99 or $2.99 in US. We have this flexibility for vendors and all of this is available for free. We have monetisation available on our app store. So when developers get their apps published on the app store, they get monetised with different price points with in-app payments so that they can make the app free but they can still make money within the application providing service or some kind of subscription or premium features they can charge for that using micro payments.
We have carrier billings in India and Asia. You can use carrier billing to actually monetise your apps. So there is a high chance of getting revenue which is one of the reasons developers make most money on BlackBerry. In fact, they make 4 per cent more as compared to other platforms according to the report by developer economics, an independent research done by Vision Mobile. BlackBerry developers make 4% more income on an average per app, based on revenue when compared to iOS; and 84% more than Android. Android is really difficult to monetise and make money. This is why developers see the opportunity in our app world as there is no special requirement.
