With the events you have planned around developers, what are your expectations?
My expectation is that, India will continue to be a leader in the region for a real long time. I don’t think anybody comes close from a production perspective. Developers will be producing most content not just for Indian audiences, but for the world. Even today, India is one of the top countries that produces content in our App World and we expect a lot more from Indian developers. The fact that we haven’t had that number of resources available in India. We have our conference coming this November in Bangkok, Thailand. We expect a lot of Indian developers to attend that because again Thailand is a big part of Asia. I think we expect Indian developers to be a part of everything that we do. From our BlackBerry 10 launch perspective, Jam hacks is one example. We have got two winning teams that are competing against nine other countries for a winning title in Jam Asia. So we expect Indian developers to win there. But our job’s not over yet. From a launch perspective, India is a critical market for us and our Indian team is also working to make sure it to be successful.
How is an app selected, and what are the reasons for an app being rejected on the App Store?
For one, the kind of content you have is important. For example, if you have a Bollywood song or you have used some kind of image or video from a Bollywood movie, you need to make sure you have the rights to do so. You cannot just steal music or such property. So if that’s what some developers want, they look at Android as an opposite. It’s very easy to steal somebody else’s content, rearrange it, resubmit it or rename it. We make sure that we want to protect a developer’s investment and intellectual property as they they invest a lot of time to build this application. So we go to the standard guidelines from our policy perspective and make sure that we prevent someone from resubmitting an app that belongs to someone else. We check if there are content right issues. The technical aspects are pretty straight forward and open. We are not restricted to say you have to use our services, you have to use our payment services for monetizing the applications. We are not restrictive like that, and make sure that the app doesn’t clash with the licence and all user experience issues. We then notify the developer, who gets a chance to fix the issues and resubmit. It’s an open model conversation. Hence we have a lot of investment in India in that perspective. Vendors are open to work with anybody. If the app has Adult content or material that may not be suitable for children or younger audience, we have ratings and the app must be rated appropriately. It’s quite flexible. Usually our vendors say our process is one of the easiest they have ever dealt with.
As in the recent news, how safe is it to port apps from android to BlackBerry using migration tool?
Just from an Android app porting perspective, you’re safer porting your Android app to the BlackBerry app world than in the Play Store because as I outlined earlier that there is huge piracy going on in the Play Store and nobody seems to be solving that. Security and piracy are issue on the Play Store. However on the flipside, there are a lot of success stories of Android developers who have submitted their app to BlackBerry App World and have made more money in one day then they ever made on Android in a year. There are lot of other cases we have seen come out of that. It’s no different, of course we have a process where somebody identifies that this app is accessing some content, infringing intellectual property, and investigate every case.
Of course we try to protect developers and content as much as possible. I don’t see any risk to do Android app v/s native BlackBerry app.
While on the same topic, what does BlackBerry intend to focus on in the future? Would you look at selling IP?
I guess, we are an open platform. In everything we do, developers are set of the ecosystems for our efforts. So when we add services, such as BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), we don’t just keep it to ourselves, but we rather open it to our developer community as well. This enables them to use it as a free marketing or monetisation tool to use in BBM or BBM-connected apps that are more 50 times likely to be downloaded on the app world and app that don’t integrate with BBM. There are plenty of success stories and examples for tools that are unique at selling point for BlackBerry, things like BBM and things like the push protocol.
We have got push SDK available for developers on BlackBerry 10 as on older devices to be able to use this functionality under real time push framework and have that always on and always notification kind of experience. Plenty of examples for all the services we have monetisation services, the payment services include great example and developers get that for free, they don’t actually have to use anything special. It doesn’t matter how many payment options we offer. We offer PayPal, we offer credit card, we offer carrier billing, whatever payment. We take away the burden from you of imagining that we offer developers 70-30 split no matter how the payment comes. Developers don’t have to worry about to start the payment process as we manage everything from that point on.
So there is lot of good stuff coming and cash key is another example. We have got new thing we call BlackBerry flow and peak it’s unlike any other experience you would have seen in a mobile device and it’s available for developers. Their user experience goes from very interrupted slow moving experience they had on other platforms to a fast fluid moving experience without any interruptions it flows from one experience to another, it is something again that our developers have access to. All our APIs are feature complete though BlackBerry 10 is in beta mode but all the APIs are already available for developers to create unique experience in BlackBerry 10APIs.
