An Experiment In BlackBerry Development 207
ballwall writes "We've all read the stories about how lucrative selling apps on the iPhone can be (or not), but what about other platforms? BlackBerry accounts for twice as many handsets shipped as Apple, according to Gartner, so I decided to find out. I wrote about my experiences developing my first BlackBerry application including sales, platform issues, and a bunch of other things I thought new mobile developers might want to know about."
Sure there are more blackberries (Score:5, Informative)
But, there more are corporate users without the right to install anything...
Re:Blackberry's problem (Score:4, Informative)
I thought Java was already quite open.
Doesn't mean it's easy. But it's open.
Re:You forgot the most important thing... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Blackberry's problem (Score:1, Informative)
Did you RFTA? RIM doesn't totally open up their API to 3rd party developers.
Re:Total (Score:5, Informative)
Whoops, oversight on my part. Total sales stand at 2382 copies as of the data in the article (at an average net of $8.50 per sale I've made just over $20k). Thanks for pointing that out. I'd update the site but I'm afraid to break at the moment.
Re:Thank you (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Thank you (Score:2, Informative)
Lets not allow an incompetent sysadmin get in the way of trashing a platform that works great for millions though. Right?
Re:Thank you (Score:5, Informative)
BES is, IMHO, a steaming pile - java, dot.net,
Ok, BES does use many technologies. The new BES 5 even requires activeX plugins for some web-based admin tools.
32-bit only. Feh.
Ummm, not true. BES has supported 64-bit windows and 64-bit databases for quite a long time.
Recent iPhones handle active sync nicely and don't bitch about self-signed certs.
Ummm, that's called a security flaw by most competent admins. Frankly, if you can't afford $12.99/year (with coupon code) to get a godaddy signed certificate, maybe security isn't what you're looking for. Is it possible to install your own certificate authority on iphone (or is it that apple doesn't let you)? You can install your own certificates on blackberry, and even manage them all centrally on the BES. You can even use S/MIME & PGP for additional email encryption.
My clients pay $$ for BES CALs, the devices get stupid and need to be factory reset often and re-activated, costing my client more $$ for my time.
Well, then you & your clients don't know how to administer a BES & blackberries. The devices are extremely solid, and almost never need a factory wipe. Of course, most problems will be resolved by a factory wipe & reactivating, but there is almost always a far easier & faster way to resolve the issue, but it seems you don't know that.
When something goes wrong with a windows pc, do you wipe your hard disk & reinstall every time? That will resolve the issue, but there is almost always a simpler, easier & faster solution.
Reactivating a blackberry user on a BES is REALLY HARD! How hard is it? On the BES 4 series, you run the BES console, find the user, right-click on the user, and set the activation password to whatever you like. Then, on the blackberry, go to options, advanced options, enterprise activation, enter your email address, enter the activation password you just set, and click activate. Wasn't that hard?
Frankly, if your clients can't activate a blackberry by themselves, then maybe they aren't smart enough to use email.
I honestly cannot see the attraction when there are better solutions to talk to an Exchange server
Better? How many other solutions have real push email? None (windows mobile comes close with their fake push). How many other mobile email solutions have remote lock, remote unlock, remote wipe, solid AES encryption, certification by many governments [blackberry.com] and other agencies?. Can you force your users to have a password? Can you force your users to always encrypt the blackberry contents? Does your iphone overwrite freed memory so that the contents can't be read by disassembling the device? Nope.
Do you need to restrict your user from browsing the web? Do you need to centrally track SMS, email & phone calls? All this is easy on the BES.
iPhones, WinMobile or a laptop with RPC over HTTP(S) all work more simply
Ok, that's true. The BES platform is complex, but that is because it does so much.
Look, BES isn't for everyone - there is a lot of complexity & a lot to learn. You may be better off with an outsourced BES provider (there are many). Or choose the Blackberry Professional Software (BPS), which is a simpler, easier to use BES-lite.
Re:Thank you (Score:5, Informative)
OK, fair enough to yours and all of the above replies. I'm replying to yours as it is the harshest, but no hard feelings.
I should have mentioned that I provide services to small and almost medium-sized businesses and orgs. If I was in an "enterprise" admin role my feelings would be different, and so would the needs and realities my clients face. Picture a law office with 8 users, a business with 20 users, an org with 40 users - that's my space. For this space, licensing and labor cost far more than hardware.
For this market segment, BES is not, IMHO, the way to go. Licensing and maintenance will bleed my customers dry. Exchange is the cheapest "groupware"-ish solution I can provide for them. For their mobile devices, the same logic applies - keep licensing and maintenance to a minimum. I appreciate that for "enterprise" the added security and logging of BES/blackberry are desirable. Where I live, selling a decent backup solution is a hard task.
And for those about to suggest it - yes, I have tried the open source route. Hate to say it - they want Office, they want Outlook, they want their calendars/contacts/tasks/etc. That means Exchange. Pains me a bit, but I get over it.
Yes, the web and email and other internet facing servers are on linux VPSs - not gonna put Exchange or Sharepoint on a public IP, but in the LAN I have to go win*. Don't like it, would prefer otherwise, hope to see the day...
Re:So (Score:5, Informative)
A lot about it. That is a pretty long posting with some insight for people completely unfamiliar with the world of blackberry development.
The story gets an upmod for that, though I suppose it could be seen as a really long plug for the guy's product. He mentions the surge from advertising on blogs and even includes graphs showing his trials vs. sales over time with some bumps pointed out.
A decent read overall.
Re:Blackberry's problem (Score:4, Informative)
Did you RFTA? RIM doesn't totally open up their API to 3rd party developers.
You are not communicating that right. The RIM specific API (ie: device specific functionality) is open to developers but different generations of functionality from these APIs are available only on certain devices.
If you want to access the entire market you have to stay plain vanilla and use straight java.
The author does a good job explaining it if anyone would care to RTFA.
Re:Thank you (Score:2, Informative)
I worked for a small company that subscribed to an outsourced BES+Exchange hosting service on a per-user subscription basis.
I have to say, my experience as a user was fabulous. The syncing across calendar, mail, and contacts "just worked". Most sync tools have hidden reset options to clear you local version and restore from remote, clear the remote version and restore from local, or some kind of complex manual conflict reconcilation mechanism.
With BES, there are no such options, and you don't need them. The system just works. Nothing weird happened if I tried to erase a contact from my blackberry and my Outlook at the same time or added a calendar entry from one and then moved it on the other. Everything was push based, so changes got propagated out instantly, rather than on some kind of 1 hour poll interval. I could send out multi-person invites just using the blackberry, and other people would get them just as if I'd sent them from Outlook. In fact, the BB was often more reliable than Outlook since it dealt better with network flakiness/slowness.
But then, my company got acquired by a company that didn't use Exchange, had no BES, but had standardized on BB and iPhone. In this environment, things were radically different. Without the BES+Exchange combo, you need to use a 3rd party clunky app (possibly more than 1 depending on your setup) and you can forget about real-time anything. Everything is on at least 5 minute delay or worse (calendar and contacts are on like, 2 hour delay).
5 minute delay doesn't sound like much, but with the Exchange+BES combo, BB wielders got used to e-mailing each other as if it were IM and having a stream of 1 line conversations with each other. Now, we need to consider what we want to say and switch to SMS if we want to converse with faster turnaround (at the cost of having to cmprss r words to sub 160 chr bites).
Re:Sure there are more blackberries (Score:5, Informative)
I develop applications for BlackBerry and I've talked to RIM about what restrictions corporate users will see. According to RIM, only 40% of BlackBerry users are on BlackBerry Enterprise Networks (BES) and over 90% of BES installations use the default settings. The default BES settings do not impose any restrictions on the device.
Re:Thank you (Score:3, Informative)
While I half-agree with the rest of your post, your 911 point was non-sense. Federal law bars cellphone manufacturers from preventing 911 dialing in any way. That's why you can always dial 911 on any cellphone whether its activated or not, whether the screen's locked or not, no matter what. Remote bricking someone's phone with RIM's tools won't stop you from using 911.
Re:Thank you (Score:1, Informative)
Imagine if for whatever reason you need to place a 911 call.. and just before you hit send, someone in IT accidentally clicks "wipe your BB", which turns it into a brick
Not really. After the wipe, all the data is gone from the phone (including the microSD card), but you end up with a bare phone that can make phone calls. It's similar to getting a new phone from your cellphone company.
And even with a locked, fully encrypted blackberry, you can make emergency phone calls to 911.
Re:Thank you (Score:3, Informative)
It can actually be an issue. A wiped Blackberry will still place 911 calls. A Blackberry being wiped, however, will not. And the last time I had a Blackberry wiped from under me (I had a dispute with our Asset Management group; they won), it took about 60 minutes, due to security policies and scrubbing memory. During that time, the Blackberry was useless for any purpose, including placing 911 calls.
Re:Thank you (Score:4, Informative)
Blackberries on BES offer enterprise features simply unheard of with Winmobile or iphone devices.
Maybe unheard of to you. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb123484.aspx [microsoft.com] I count well over 100 group policy settings that can be applied through Activesync to a Windows Mobile 6.1 device. Some of these actually do work on an iPhone as well, such as the password and phone lock policies.
Windows mobile only recently got the much needed security features such as remote device deactivation and wiping.
Windows Mobile + Exchange 2003/2007 have had this functionality since 2005 at the release of Exchange 2003 SP2 http://www.microsoft.com/DOWNLOADS/details.aspx?familyid=535BEF85-3096-45F8-AA43-60F1F58B3C40&displaylang=en [microsoft.com]. It even works on an iPhone. I'd hardly call 2005 "recent" in the IT world.
My experiences developing on the BlackBerry. (Score:3, Informative)
I actually have a free application on the BlackBerry App World called HP Printer Fun, which lets users mess with the LED screens on the HP Laser Jet printers (plus some inkjet ones too) for fun.
I've written some other apps as well and the experience is not so great. My gripes are as follows:
On the other hand, the docs are pretty good. The support group at BlackBerry dev site is simple superb. Examples are plenty and the API just freaking makes a massive amount of sense. And for the adventurous, you could use a beta version (might be released by now) of an Eclipse plugin.
Re:You forgot the most important thing... (Score:5, Informative)
I demand a free SSH client now
Alright, here you go: http://www.xk72.com/midpssh/ [xk72.com]
Oh, it's open source too (GPL). Here's the code: http://www.xk72.com/midpssh/v1.7.3/midpssh.zip [xk72.com]
Oh, it's J2ME too, so it can run on any phone that has java.
Re:Thank you (Score:4, Informative)
Well, as we are all aware, nobody cares how hard the admin's job is. The Enterprise is BB's target market and they're dug in deep. Just the ability to sync with Exchange calendars, contacts and email is 99% of why Blackberry exists - because BES is great if you're a user. If you're an admin, your job is to support the business and the business wants Exchange sync.
Read what he said again. The blackberry requires a whole bunch of 3rd party software to do that in a vaguely okay way, all of which is limiting, and a pain in the ass. By contrast, the iPhone does exchange calendar, contact and email syncing straight out the box, with extra faffing about.
Re:Blackberry's problem (Score:5, Informative)
Just correcting you, i'm a BlackBerry developer so have some insight here. The number of users using pre4.0 is miniscule, v4 OS onwards offers everything you need. The vast majority of developers code using the 4.2.0 API. As more and more users migrate to the newer devices developers change the API they code against accordingly.
The requirements for AppWorld are 'BlackBerry® Device Software version 4.2 or higher' so this is what most developers code against as it's their primary sales channel.
Developers are free to code using the more recent API to get the added features and the JDE has PreProcessor definitions for this... The BlackBerry is an old platform, new devices appear and old ones stop being supported. You'd be crazy to still make sure your software works correctly on a 7230.
'If you want to access the entire market you have to stay plain vanilla and use straight java.' this is complete uninformed nonsense.
RIM can use a lot of encryption (Score:1, Informative)
I'm sorry, are you kidding me? The blackberry requires all your corporate communications to go through their third party server. That's the big security hole you need to be worried about, right there.
Not really. From how I understand things:
. message arrives on your e-mail platform
. it's encrypted, sent to the local BES server
. encrypted again, sent to RIM's data centre (unencrypted on arrival)
. sent to you carrier provider's DC, encrypted (GSM/CDMA) and sent over the air
. unencrypted via the GM protocol, unencrypted with the key it shares with your messaging platform
You can also have all SD media encrypted as well, and have remote wipe functionality.
There are a lot of government types that use BBs, and I'm sure that it's been looked at quite closely. For what it's worth, the BES has a EAL 4+ CC cert, and the Blackberrys themselves are also certified. Commercially available units can't handle SECRET or TOP SECRET though:
http://na.blackberry.com/eng/ataglance/security/certifications.jsp
I'm sure that's good enough enough to protect most corporate information.
Re:You know, the first FREE app and you're history (Score:3, Informative)
If a serious free competitor came along and it was enough to drive my support costs higher than the revenue (though that's an arbitrary line since my 'costs' are just my time) I'd probably open source it. (Though this may change if I can get some DRM providers like audible on board).
Re:Bad UI library (Score:3, Informative)
Just to pipe in in my defense. I did state with the networking stuff in the article that it can be figured out, but it's a huge hurdle for non-network apps that may need an HTTP request every now and then.
As for the UI, I'm fine extending the base classes and drawing my own stuff (but make no mistake, you're drawing lines and shading rects to make it happen), my point is that I *don't* have any skills in graphic design, I know that. But... all of the other platforms make allowances for that and give you base widgets that set you up pretty well right out of the gate.
Re:Thank you (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Thank you (Score:3, Informative)