Over the past weeks RIM, now known as Blackberry, has been making quite a fuss about developer interest in their platform. As we reported earlier, they have been staging so called port-a-thons where they would pay developers and offer other incentives just so they would port their apps to Blackberry"s new operating system. According to the Canadian company, this has been a major success and the OS is now launching with 70.000 apps on board.
Earlier on stage, Blackberry officials revealed their platform also had "1000 top apps from across the globe". Though details are a bit hard to come by, the folks at BB name checked a few major apps including: Whatsapp, Kindle, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Where"s my Perry and the Angry Birds series.
Perhaps most surprinsingly, they also mentioned Skype was onboard. Skype, owned by Microsoft, is one of the world"s most popular VOIP clients out there and why Microsoft is letting their competitors use their product is a bit of a puzzle, especially as Skype integration is touted as an important feature on Windows Phone. It may be that Microsoft doesn"t think BB10 is going anywhere so there"s no threat or it may be that the Redmond company is simply interested in getting as many users as possible on Skype, regardless of what platform they use.
We all know apps are an extremely important part of the ecosystem around a phone and a strong app catalog may improve RIM Blackberry"s chances at competing in the marketplace. However, there are still some questions left unanswered. First of all those 70.000 apps are most likely spread around different regions so it"s very likely you"ll get different experiences depending on where you buy your device. Then there"s the issue of quality. Sure, a big number of apps has a nice ring to it but what"s really important is the quality of said apps and getting thousands of people to port apps as fast as they can in exchange for a paycheck is definitely not the way to go if your aiming for quality.
Of course these issues will be sorted out once users finally get their hands on Blackberry 10 devices and get to experience everything first hand.