RIM's BlackBerry App World Tops Three Billion Downloads
Some good news for Research In Motion amid the unceasing torrent of bad. BlackBerry App World, the company's answer to Apple's iTunes App Store and Google Play, has reached a milestone worth celebrating: It has served …
Context & Ripple Effects
The three-billion mark lands at a low ebb for Research In Motion, which has spent years ceding ground since the 2007 peak when BlackBerry demand swelled and earnings more than doubled. What keeps the store strategically relevant is its economics: RIM reported in February 2012 that App World was pulling six million daily downloads with higher per-download profitability than Android, meaning each download is worth more developer money than on Google Play.
That combination — smaller but better-monetizing catalog — is the argument RIM needs as it positions App World against Apple's iTunes App Store and Google Play, and as acquisition chatter like the 2010 Microsoft-buying-RIM speculation keeps framing the company as a target rather than a competitor. The breadth of pickup on this story, from The Verge and CNET to The Globe and Mail and BlackBerry's own developer blog, shows how much weight developers and carriers are putting on any sign of platform life.
First-order effects
- Developers weighing whether to keep shipping BlackBerry builds get a concrete data point: an installed base generating three billion cumulative downloads, with per-download revenue that RIM says beats Android's.
- RIM gains a counter-narrative to the torrent of negative coverage, useful in carrier negotiations and in recruiting developers ahead of its next platform push.
Second-order effects
- Apple and Google are under no pressure to respond to a distant third store, so competitive pressure instead runs through developer time: every hour spent on App World is one not spent on iOS or Android, and RIM must price its store terms to win that contest.
- Carriers and enterprise buyers evaluating RIM hardware get a healthier app-catalog story to justify continued BlackBerry commitments while the company transitions platforms.
Third-order effects
- If the download momentum carries into RIM's next OS launch, the app catalog becomes the asset that determines whether BlackBerry survives as a third ecosystem or its users migrate to the Apple-Google duopoly.
- More broadly, the episode illustrates how app-store scale has become the decisive moat in mobile: hardware share alone no longer sustains a platform without a storefront that developers can monetize.
The trend: Mobile platforms are consolidating around a handful of app stores whose download scale and monetization rates, not handset shipments alone, decide which ecosystems developers keep alive.