In your opinion what makes more sense – develop natively or use of tools such as PhoneGap or the myriad of cross platform tools available, or port multiple apps?
That depends on what the objective is of the developer. If I am not trying to monetise the brand, or say any developer is trying to make a free application or perhaps your main goal is to get as many eye balls as possible without putting a minimum effort then I think these cross platform tools are a great way to start especially somebody using mobility. There are lots of brands and lots or companies out there that they just don’t know where to start. They do BlackBerry, they do Android, and they do iOS. They do Windows. I think PhoneGap is one of the tools and it solves a very specific problem which is a cross platform issue.
Having said that, that’s not the only goal for lot of companies to be successful to establish certain brand on these mobile devices, they want to maintain a certain level of experience and there are other developers who want to make business out of there application. If you are in business to create a mobile application and looking at it as a monetisation perspective all developers would develop native application on their platform. If you think about success stories such as Flipboard, or any names in the industry such as BBM, you will see the application experience is restricted to a specific platform. Flipboard was first done on iOS and that’s where it started. You can now get it on Android but it’s a copy of the same app. It’s very heavily tied to that native experience. The same holds true with BBM. All BBM-connected apps are successful.
Similarly if you are trying to differentiate, if you are trying to create experience unlike any other and really want to maintain that user experience then natively is the way to go. You have to look at the platform, you have to look at the benefits of it. BlackBerry 10 offers really amazing benefits and a very low cost. The same study which said that BlackBerry developers make 4% more revenue compared to iOS developers per app on an average also said that the cost of development is also lowest in BlackBerry vis-a-vis any other platform and the cost of developing in iOS is the most expensive, followed by Android. Finally, BlackBerry is the least expensive because of the open tools. We don’t charge our developers! We try to make their lives as easy as possible and reduce the obstacles for them.
With BlackBerry 10, would RIM make a move to touch? What happens to the benchmark QWERTY that BlackBerrys are known for?
There are people you will never be able to convince to use touch devices. It doesn’t matter what you tell them. They need that tactile feedback. If you could recall, recently stars such as Katy Perry and some other stars have publicly talked about it.
You probably would have known, we actually announced very clearly that there will definitely be a keyboard version of BlackBerry 10. So it’s not going to be all touch and people are actually excited about that, and many have taken a sigh of relief as BlackBerrys are known for their QWERTY keyboards, and offer the best keyboard experience. Yes, BlackBerry’s touch experience is unlike any other touch experience out there. You can touch an iOS device, an Android device, but once you pick up a BlackBerry 10 device, you will forget everything you have used before whether you use keyboard or not. The main reason is it uses lot of different gestures we use in everyday life. So first thing is that the device doesn’t have any buttons! It doesn’t have a home button, it doesn’t have any buttons to use! It is truly an all touch interface with most of the gestures in one hand, instead of requiring both hands. We are pretty confident that we might able to win some other keyboard users over to BlackBerry 10.
What do you have to say on platforms such as Windows Phone which is facing a similar situation in a very competitive smartphone market?
BlackBerry 10 at this point of time, offers a high-end experience. We haven’t made any announcements of any additional devices, but of course, there will be more to come after the touch devices you have seen around as long as the keyboard version is revealed. But I think BlackBerry is an aspirational brand and we are still seeing a lot of success in our existing market in our portfolio devices such as the BlackBerry Curve, specifically. I think the demand is going to remain for a while and we have 80 million subscribers globally in that market platform and that continues to grow.
[do action=”inside-quote”]…the device doesn’t have any buttons! It doesn’t have a home button, it doesn’t have any buttons to use![/do]
So we see a huge demand of BlackBerry and BlackBerry OS technology in market today and it would be interesting to see how we translate from that into BlackBerry 10 Experience, we are still a while away from that but I think we are still growing, quarter by quarter the users of BlackBerry OS and market share is growing and we are pretty excited about that and we are really loving people drop feature phone experience to smartphone experience that actually gives them access to BBM and use application on their devices. It’s a progression worth sort of considering for consumers and hopefully soon we will be happy to see they use something on BlackBerry 10.
