BB10 has 70,000 Apps, But No Use
Bangalore: When BlackBerry announced its two new phones last week, it spent a good part of the presentation hyping on the app selection it had. However the new BlackBerry 10 seems to be worthless with the absence of a strong collection of app selection. This does not mean the number of apps available (which is 70,000 in number) but the need for popular apps that people use and care about.
At the launch, Martyn Mallick, the Vice President of BlackBerry, took the stage and began rattling off a bunch of apps that were available on BB10, Skype, Amazon, Kindle, WhatsApp, Angry Birds and so on. But with the exception of Angry Birds, none of those were packed on the system as yet.
Popular apps like Instagram were not mentioned at all. Gmail, Pandora or even Evernote were not heard on the list. There was no guarantee of any of those apps to come to BB10. The Facebook app that ships with BB10 isn’t made by Facebook but RIM. The same is with Dropbox, Google Talk and Yahoo Messenger.
Despite RIM’s best efforts at courting developers, it’s clear that many, if not most of the important ones don’t think BB10 is worth their time. There’s little incentive for developers to care about BB10, which means there’s little incentive for one to care about using it if one cares about apps.
