Blackberry pledges commitment to developer support

In the wake of recent news that RIM has increased its efforts with regards to attracted more developers to its App World store, the company’s developer relations director has told Develop that developer choice is one of the key focuses as the company strives to improve its offering.

Blackberry firm RIM has recently revealed a range of new developer services, integrating revised payment and advertising APIs into the platform’s infrastructure, and increasing support for geo-location, push notifications and Open GLS 1.0.

"We’re giving developers choice, not just in how they commercialise apps – they don’t have to sell them through app world, and can sell them wherever they want however they want through carriers or channels like Crackberry – but also we offer choice in tooling and methodoly," Mike Kirkup told Develop.

"We support Java, and we support web very heavily. We’re moving towards Flash, and you’ll see us continue to enhance that so that we meet developers where they want development rather than try and force them to our methodology.”

Speaking of rival platforms’ stores, Kirkup later added: “The discoverability issue is specifically why we don’t believe App World needs to be that kind of channel. We have App World there to make it easy for people to attract and acquire customers that are very difficult to acquire in some other models.”