While app numbers are a key to a mobile platform's success, turns out BlackBerry's taken it really seriously. A new revelation reveals that almost one-third of its apps have been developed by just one developer.
According to a
report by BerryReview, more than 47,000 apps in BlackBerry World, BlackBerry's app and content marketplace, are offered by a single developer by the name of S4BB. A large number of these apps are merely wrappers for content such as audiobooks, city guides, phrasbooks and fart apps, amongst others.
This essentially means that about one-third of the apps available on the BlackBerry World have been published by a single developer. It appears that BlackBerry was boasting of big app numbers riding on these 'almost spam' apps by a single developer, in a bid to counter the naysayers' 'lack of apps' argument when it launched BlackBerry 10, without focusing on the quality of apps.
Blackberry has also been relying heavily on developers who work with other platforms, with its Port-A-Thons, rewarding them to port their existing apps for the company's new platform. According to a
report, BlackBerry has been able to generate around 40,000 BB10 apps for its BlackBerry World app store through these port-a-thons. BlackBerry's BlackBerry 10 OS has the ability to run Android apps and many of the big names have simply ported their existing Android apps to the platform.
At the time of its launch, BlackBerry had announced that 70,000 apps were available on BlackBerry World. However, most of these apps had been ported from other leading platforms.
All this implies that native development on the platform has not really taken off.