WebProNews

Tag: BlackBerry App World

  • BlackBerry 10 App Store Has Over 70,000 Apps

    While Apple and Google can brag of hundreds of thousands of apps in their respective app stores, BlackBerry (formerly known as RIM) is only just now launching its BlackBerry 10 app store. Along with the announcements of the first BlackBerry 10 smartphones, the Z10 and the Q10, BlackBerry today announced that it now has 70,000 apps in its BlackBerry World app store.

    The company claims it will launch with over 1000 of the “top applications” on smartphones. It name-dropped several big-name apps, including Skype, Amazon’s Kindle app, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The app store will also have a limited selection of games highlighted by Fruit Ninja and the Angry Birds games, including Angry Birds Star Wars. The app store has a fairly solid launch line-up of apps, and includes most of the major social and news apps.

    Though 70,000 apps is a testament to BlackBerry’s developer outreach and its efforts at making BlackBerry 10 ports simple to create, that number is still less than one one-hundredth of the number of apps that can be found in the Apple App Store or Google Play. If BlackBerry 10 is to be the product that turns around RIM’s BlackBerry’s fortunes, the company will have continue to lure compelling software to its platform.

  • RIM Says BlackBerry App World More Profitable Than Android

    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.