Speaking at BlackBerry DevCon in Europe RIM’s Vice President for Developer Relations, Alec Saunders, had some interesting things to say about the BlackBerry App World. Saying that he wanted to “bust a few myths,” Saunders said that BlackBerry users download over 6 million apps per day from BlackBerry’s app store. That translates to 174 million downloads a month, which translates to almost 2.1 billion downloads per year. That works out to 30 downloads per BlackBerry user per year. That, Saunders argued, puts paid to the notion that BlackBerry users don’t use apps.
Saunders also took issue with the claim that BlackBerry App World isn’t profitable. He argued that App World sees more paid downloads than the Android App Market, and that it sees 43% more downloads per app per day than Apple’s App Store. In fact, Saunders said, BlackBerry App World generates 40% more revenue than Google’s Android App Market, putting it solidly in second place behind Apple’s iOS App Store in terms of profitability.
While it may be true that BlackBerry App World is more profitable than Android, it is also true that the Android App Market has a significantly higher percentage of free apps than either App World or the iOS App Store, so Android may not be the best comparison. Also, even as RIM is bragging that App World is a more profitable than the Android App Market, they are also putting forth a great deal of effort to get Android developers working for them. The addition of RunTime to the BlackBerry 10 and PlayBook 2.0 operating systems is meant to provide an easy way for developers to port their Android apps to BlackBerry devices.