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Fancy a bigger rev-share on Blackberry App World?

Demo-to-full version upsell isn't a loophole - it's a feature!

Fancy a bigger rev-share on Blackberry App World?
By , Contributing Editor
It turns out that a feature of the BlackBerry App World is the ability for developers to give apps away for free, then get users to pay later outside the official payment mechanism of RIM's app store.

Music app Shazam is one of the first to take advantage. It's free to download from App World, but warns users that its unlimited features are only free to use for a trial period of 60 days.

After that date, users will have to pay £5 to prevent the app reverting to a limited version.

But here's the thing: when you click through to pay the £5 - which you can do at any point during that 60 days - you're taken to a Shazam WAP page that asks you to enter your credit card details.

We're assuming this means the developer - Shazam in this case - gets to keep all the revenues. Well, at least the revenues minus the credit card processing fee. It's certainly not using the PayPal payments system mandated by RIM for App World.

A great big loophole that RIM will be closing, right? Wrong. We contacted the company, and found out that it has no problem at all with this form of pricing - and pointed out that Salesforce.com's BlackBerry app operates a similar 'free to download, pay to use' model.

The implications for mobile games are striking.

Theoretically, a developer or publisher can give away a full version of their game for free on the App World, but keep most of it locked until the player pays, leaving the developer with a bigger share of the loot.

There are big caveats, though. The ease of paying an up-front fee for a game on the App World should outweigh the fiddly process of entering credit card details in-game. And many developers don't want the hassle of processing payments themselves.

However, on the plus side, the freedom given by RIM enables developers to charge monthly subscriptions or micro-transactions if they want, without having to wait for RIM to introduce them.

But even so, news that app developers can upsell from free to paid without paying RIM (or, indeed, operators) their share could provoke some raised eyebrows in the industry.
Stuart Dredge
Stuart Dredge
Contributing Editor

Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)