A recent report by Baird Equity Research shows that developer intent for BlackBerry 10 is on the decline, which completely contradicts what is being “seen and heard in the developer community” according to the BlackBerry Developer Blog.
“Needless to say, I was pretty shocked by the findings,” says Alec Saunders, VP of Developer Relations at RIM. “I was shocked because the numbers in the report do not gel with what we’re seeing in the real world.”
Baird surveyed 200 developers culled from a sample set of 4,300 and found that their collective outlook for BlackBerry 10 — charted on a 10-point scale from poor to excellent — had fallen to 3.8 from 4.6 in the previous quarter. Meanwhile, their outlook for the BlackBerry 7 declined to 2.8 from 3.8.
Says Baird, “31 percent of sampled BlackBerry 10 developers said that they have shifted some or all of their work away from BB10, compared with 34 percent in Q1. This is the second quarter in which we have seen fewer responders indicating that they will shift some of their work away from BlackBerry. We believe that many developers who planned to jump ship have already made the move, leaving a BlackBerry developer base that is smaller but increasingly loyal.”
While there’s some comfort to be found in the idea of a small but increasingly loyal developer base for BlackBerry 10, Saunders believes the report was a great deal false:
In the past year our BlackBerry App World ™ vendor base has grown 157 percent. We have developers submitting amazing apps for BlackBerry® PlayBook™ users. In fact, the BlackBerry PlayBook app catalog has grown by more than 15,000 apps since January 1 of this year. We just announced that more than three billion applications have been downloaded from BlackBerry App World since launch.
But much more importantly, the BlackBerry 10 Jam World Tour we are currently hosting in 23 cities across the globe has seen over capacity registration in almost every city, including New York, Santa Clara, Toronto, Jakarta, Singapore, Delhi, and Montreal. We have already spoken to almost 5,000 developers and the feedback has been phenomenal (don’t take my word for it, search Twitter for the hashtag #bb10jam).
I have been receiving a lot of feedback from developers personally and I can tell you that I am hearing again and again that developers are amazed by how easy it is to work with the BlackBerry 10 tools. They appreciate the open nature of our platform, which allows developers to bring their work and their skills and find a toolset that will work for them. The other thing I hear consistently is that RIM simply treats developers better than anyone else in the mobile industry. That is music to my ears! I want to once again thank our developer community. You see what we are doing to increase our support for you. You see what RIM is building with BlackBerry 10 and the amazing opportunity to be part of our new platform and you have shared your enthusiasm and excitement with us.
BlackBerry Developer Blog, All Things D