Alec Saunders, RIM's veep of developer relations was in offensive mode at the company's BlackBerry Developers Conference in San Francisco.

In his opening session, he was out to 'bust some myths' about Blackberry as a market opportunity.

Although admitting RIM's strategy hadn't been as good as it could have been, he said this was changing with BBX.

More importantly, he stressed that the BlackBerry market wasn't shrinking - with user numbers up to 70 million.

Only way is up

He said it wasn't true that BlackBerry users didn't download apps. RIM's research has concluded that its users download 24 apps annually, with the current spurt in downloads particularly been driven by BlackBerry 7 adoption and the launch of BBM Connected apps - 25 million downloads to-date.

Finally, Saunders was keen to point out that BlackBerry developers do make money, revealing that 13 percent of BlackBerry developers have made more than $100,000, appearing to contrast that with developer Owen Goss' not entirely representative survey that the median game on iOS earned just $1,100.

"App World is the second most profitable app store ahead of Android Market," he claimed.