There has been a lot of rumours on the internet lately with regards to BlackBerry and Research In Motion including articles pointing to the demise and irrelvancy of the BlackBerry platform. Despite some efforts from RIM to contain these myths, I have decided to put together a fact sheet to help us loyal #TeamBlackBerry users get the facts right about what that others have been saying about the platform.
No one uses a BlackBerrys anymore
Last quarter, Research in Motion sold over 7.8 million smart phones and 260,000 PlayBooks in addition to the 49 million BlackBery and 1 million PlayBooks sold in the last fiscal year - that is approximately 140,000 devices sold EVERY SINGLE DAY! These sales are make up core of #TeamBlackBerry which has a total subscriber base of 78 million strong.
BlackBerrys have no apps
Currently there are over 125,000 apps submitted to BlackBerry App World (I got this figure from the app # that I submitted just an hour ago). This is figure while admittely is still lagging from the competition, is a number that we've seen to be rapidly increasing. Within the last 175 days (starting from July 10th), BlackBerry users have made over 1 billion app downloads - thats approixmately 5,714,286 downloads a day or an average of 13 apps downloaded per 78 million users within that period - keep in mind not all users have access to BlackBerry App World so that actual figure is lot higher per user! This brings the total number of BlackBerry app downloaded to over 3 billion downloads!
Developers are not interested in developing for BlackBerry
There was an article published last week which talked about the lack of developer interest in developing for the BlackBerry platform. Since the launch of the BlackBerry PlayBook in April 2011, there has been more than 25,000 apps submitted for this device. This is approximately 55 PlayBook app submissions per day. The majority of the applications submitted for the BlackBerry PlayBook will run as-is on BlackBerry 10 platform or be able to run with minimal adjustment. This means, assuming a linear momentum with no growth (ie. no large growth of developer interest - which we know is absolutely false, just search #bb10jam), BlackBerry 10 will have approximately 34,000 apps compatibale apps avaliable on launch date (assuming we see BB10 launched in Janurary)! As RIM continues their BlackBerry Jam World Tour sedding over 6,000 devices to intersted developers, we can expect to see that the interest in development for the platform to continue to grow as developers continue to comment on how easy it is to develop for the platform.
There no value in buying a BlackBerry
Messaging (BBM), instant noticiations, qwerty keyboards, these are the features that BlackBerry is King over when compared to other devices in the smartphone world. These features drive what makes a BlackBerry a BlackBerry and differentiates a smartphone user from a BlackBerry user (or as Thorsten calls them 'BlackBerry People'). One of the key drivers of BlackBerry in consumer markets like Asia is the BlackBerry Messenger app which is exclusive to BlackBerry smartphone devices. Despite numerous discussions to licence out the software to other platforms which are not able to replicate it's instant notifications abilites, RIM has decided that BBM will be one of their 'core' features which will help drive consumer sales in BlackBerry devices all over the world.
Having written the above, I am convinced that Research in Motion has been built with a solid business core of 78 million users, an expanding development community, and value being the king of notifications, messaging and physical keyboards in the smartphone world. These core fundamentals is why BlackBerry is still in business and why people will continue to support this platform. So I'm convinced that RIM is not dead ... the question is are you? Let us know in the comments what you think!
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