It's no secret that RIM has been behind the curve when it comes to making BlackBerry a comfortable platform for most developers to work on.

However, following on what's now becoming a long line of innovations to the platform, the firm has unveiled its latest venture designed to placate the development community – a free analytics SDK.

Eyes on analyticsCurrently available in beta form, the new SDK provides what RIM claims is a no nonsense way for studios to track how consumers use their apps, naturally aiding any improvements they might make in the future.

"Capturing and aggregating information about application usage is what analytics is all about, and with the beta release of the BlackBerry Analytics SDK, it is surprisingly simple to get good information to help answer those questions," the firm says on its BlackBerry developer's blog.

"Some very good information can be tracked such as the number of times the application opens, closes, the number of screen views, carriers, device models as well as usage time.

"Many other events in your application can be captured as well, and there are built-in reports for media playback, product views and more."

Reaching out

There are, of course, already third party analytics tools for BlackBerry, but the roll out of the official SDK marks another page in RIM's attempts to sure up developer support for the platform across smartphone and tablet alike.

In February alone, RIM has added in-app purchases to BlackBerry App World and – in view of the launch of its forthcoming tablet - unveiled browser support for the firm's PlayBook OS simulator to enable studios to see how Flash and HTML5 standards function from a consumer standpoint.

As far as PlayBook is concerned, rumour also suggests support for Android apps might be part and parcel of the tablet's roster come release.

[source: RIM]