RIM Is Bleeding Developers
Research In Motion's sad decline is having all manner of ill effects on the company's long-suffering developer community. — Disillusioned with repeated delays to RIM's next generation BlackBerry 10 operating system and the company's ebbing smartphone market share …
Context & Ripple Effects
The developer exodus is the latest chapter in a collapse the corpus has tracked all year: a Q4 miss in March that took Balsillie out along with the CTO and COO, then bankers brought in to explore strategic options in May, and finally June's first net loss in eight years, 5,000 job cuts and another BlackBerry 10 slip. ReadWriteWeb had already argued in late June that the endgame was obvious long before the numbers confirmed it.
What is new on July 13 is who is leaving: not customers or carriers yet, but the developers whose apps make a platform worth buying into. The pickup was unusually broad — The Register, BGR, PC Magazine, MobileSyrup, BerryReview and even RIM's own BlackBerry Developer Blog carried the same AllThingsD piece — which says less about news than about how resonant the developer-frustration framing already was.
First-order effects
- Developers disillusioned by repeated BlackBerry 10 delays are redirecting effort toward iOS and Android, thinning the app catalog RIM needs for its next-generation launch.
- RIM faces another holiday season shipping phones on its aging OS while the replacement platform slips again, giving carriers and buyers no fresh reason to wait.
Second-order effects
- A thinner app catalog weakens RIM's pitch to carriers deciding shelf space and to enterprises weighing renewal, compounding the market-share erosion the corpus documents.
- With developers hedging, RIM's strategic options under the bankers' review narrow: the platform's standalone value falls relative to licensing, partnership, or breakup scenarios.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the smartphone market consolidates around operating systems that can sustain a developer ecosystem, leaving any third-place platform structurally dependent on one differentiator rather than breadth of apps.
- Developer attrition becomes a leading indicator for platform death — it shows up in catalogs and launch quality before it shows up in handset share, raising the bar for how fast a struggling vendor must ship.
The trend: Mobile platforms are consolidating around ecosystems where developer commitment tracks installed base, and RIM's BlackBerry 10 delays are pushing it past the point where developer goodwill can be rebuilt on promises alone.