You Win, RIM! (An Open Letter To RIM's Developer Relations)
You win. I concede defeat. I no longer want to attempt developing an app for the Playbook. Are you happy now? Surely you must be. Considering how terribly designed the entire process is, from the registration right through …
Context & Ripple Effects
Jamie Murai's open letter lands at a bad moment for RIM. In January, co-CEO Mike Lazaridis confirmed QNX-powered BlackBerry 'super phones' at CES — a software foundation shared with the PlayBook — so the tablet's native app pipeline matters beyond one device. Meanwhile RIM slipped out of the top five phone makers in Q4 2010 as ZTE rose to No. 4, leaving little cushion for a poorly stocked launch.
First-order effects
- Developers following Murai's path abandon PlayBook app-building over the registration-to-submission friction, directly thinning the native catalog available when the tablet reaches buyers.
- RIM's developer-relations operation becomes the visible bottleneck between the QNX super-phone roadmap announced at CES and any app library that could justify it.
Second-order effects
- With native development painful, attention shifts to the unconfirmed February 24 BGR report that RIM may let Android apps run on BlackBerry devices — a compatibility shortcut that would paper over exactly this catalog gap.
- A catalog-poor PlayBook launch pressures RIM toward drastic measures on pricing or bundling, especially coming off the quarter where it lost its top-five handset ranking to ZTE.
Third-order effects
- Platform competition increasingly turns on developer experience — sign-up, tooling, review turnaround — rather than hardware specs, meaning a vendor that loses the developer-relations race caps its own catalog no matter how good the device is.
- If catalog-poor platforms respond with compatibility layers instead of fixing their own processes, mobile ecosystems begin competing on how cheaply they can import rivals' apps rather than on native SDK quality.
The trend: Mobile platform competition is shifting from hardware specifications to developer experience, where friction anywhere between registration and submission directly caps an ecosystem's app catalog.