50 thousand BlackBerry applications developed by one company

The author of almost 50,000 programs in the BlackBerry World app store is one company, Mashable writes . This is more than a third of all 120 thousand store applications. Fruitful developer turned out to be Hong Kong company S4BB.

Among the programs from S4BB are many guidebooks and maps, phrasebooks, audiobooks, applications for searching certain sites, and simply wrappers around RSS feeds of various portals. Most applications are based on a template that has been modified for a specific application, language or city.

After the release of BlackBerry 10 in January, there were 70,000 applications in BlackBerry World. For seven months, their number has grown to 120 thousand. However, can it be called a success if most of them are applications that can hardly be called complete?
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The value of the platform is estimated not in tens of thousands of available applications, but in the presence of key applications that users really need. Obviously, BlackBerry has problems attracting independent developers. According to Mashable, the problem may lie in the fact that potential developers for BlackBerry 10 have too many options.

Developers can create HTML5 applications using WebWorks or tools from companies like Sencha or Appcelerator. Developers can create native applications using the Cascades framework. Developers can port Android programs to BlackBerry 10 using the embedded version of Android runtime inside the application.

However, most ported applications have performance issues. Many who have started building apps only to receive guaranteed BlackBerry revenue using the Built for BlackBerry apps program, a free PlayBook or Z10.

If BlackBerry wants to return to the mobile market, then it needs to offer real incentives to developers, and not to encourage the creators of the next currency converter. Instead of bragging to investors that “there are already X thousand applications in BlackBerry World,” companies should make the approval process more stringent and not miss hundreds of identical applications.