BlackBerry development stories by James Harnedy

As developers focused on the how, we don’t always put user experience at the forefront of our thinking – however I’d like to think we’re improving as a community, especially mobile developers. With that said, WHY oh WHY do platform vendors *SCREW* developers and users with a poor experience when it comes to apps. To get to my point, I’m on about the utter confusion BlackBerry puts on us mere mortals when it comes to using the available memory on the devices.

Take for example, the shiny new Storm 2 see spec. A fine piece of kit, although later than most would have liked and lacking a WebKit browser but we’ll overlook that side of it. The fact that it ships with THREE types of memory is already a baffling reality, but lets not even worry about that so much. For reference:

What does this mean to us app developers? we get to fight with the OS and every other App over the 256MB application memory. But wait, the bright sparks in Waterloo (RIM HQ) think they fixed that – they allow users to archive apps to media storage and BlackBerry will prompt to restore an app if the user tries to start it. Now, lets see. As a developer I can see how this could be seen as a great workaround. In fact I’m sure the responsible folks were chuffed with themselves. That is until the first users hit App World and saw the memory meter – tells you how much free memory your beloved BlackBerry has available. If that wasn’t enough to scare you away from installing too many apps, they continue to baffle users with features like archiving and restoring apps (why? a mental barrier to most users) and wait, the best part is yet to come – when the unsuspecting user does choose to archive an app to redeem a few megabytes for that new juicy app, it quite often requires a reboot of your PHONE to complete the task.

So users get a poor experience when it comes to apps and developers/designers need to watch every byte when it comes to building great apps. Of course a couple of large games will cause trouble for all developers who are competing for that precious available space. Forcing users to become system administrators is never a strong selling point. I remember back to around 2005, when RIM engineers asked me if I thought, as a 3rd party app developer, they should increase the memory capacity of the devices – I won’t say how loud my response was but suffice to say: I was based in Ireland at the time but you could hear my yelling from Canada! Turns out there was an internal battle in RIM when deciding how much memory to put in the devices and 3rd party developers were not getting much of a say back then. Time to find a different approach to solving this never ending battle – just write a kernel that can access apps anywhere.

Why do I write this rant given that I am a big fan of BlackBerry – I want Waterloo to take apps seriously treating them as first class citizens, just like the iPhone does. If RIM want to take on the iPhone with comparable features they better fix the app framework for developers and users together. I honestly believe RIM can compete with Apple very effectively and with their recent announcements they show a lot of promise, but please fix it so we don’t have to diet so much.