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AppNation 2011: With carrier billing, IAP, integrated advertising, and new tools strategy, BlackBerry is now open for developers

#appnation Plenty of potential

AppNation 2011: With carrier billing, IAP, integrated advertising, and new tools strategy, BlackBerry is now open for developers
"Our first year with App World was driven by free downloads but as we switch to carrier billing, we're seeing that change significantly," said Tyler Lessard, veep, BlackBerry Alliances & Developer Relations, RIM at the AppNation 2011 conference.

RIM's app store lags those from Apple and Google, but with 35 million users downloading over 3 million apps daily, it's certainly making progress.

Still, with only 20,000 apps currently available - compared to 350,000 on the Apple App Store - the company is focusing on both quantity and quality to boost its numbers.

Tools for the job

Part of this progress is ensuring developers can monetise their work. This is being encouraged with the recent support for in-app purchases, which can be paid for via operating billing, credit card or PayPal transactions.

Lessard also highlighted the value of the BlackBerry Advertising System, which launched in 2010 and is being aggressively rolled out in 2011, enabling developers to integrate RIM's own global mediation ad service.

Another way it's hoping to do this is expanding the developer tools available; something it's particularly pushing with its new BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. It launched with 2,000 apps.

As well as RIM's historic Java-based tools, PlayBook supports Adobe's Flash and AIR, while the new BlackBerry WebWorks enables so-called heavily integrated Super Apps to be created using HTML, JavaScript and CSS.

C/C++ will be available in future too, while PlayBook will support Java apps made for BlackBerry OS v6 and Android 2.3 via standalone Java players; again something to be released over the coming months.

Contributing Editor

A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.