Wednesday 29 May 2013

God Hates the Q10

I got an email a few days ago that I thought I would share with you all:

As you may or may not know, the Q10 is getting shitted on with its lack of apps, excuse my language, but I don't understand why developers are not developing for the Q10 as well. So, with that, can you please develop any of your apps, including word scramble for the Q10? I don't want t be left out with the amazing Blackberry experience because of its dearth of applications.

God

It's nice that God took the time to write to me, but strangely disconcerting that he doesn't know the preferred past-tense of 'shit' is 'shat'.

Anyway, I'm not privy to the number of apps that are available for the Q10, but apparently God doesn't think it's enough. There are a few reasons why that might be the case, and I'll try discuss them here:

1) The form-factor
The screen on the Q10 is square. What this means is that porting apps from the Z10 to the Q10 requires a complete redesign of the UI. In some cases it might be impossible simply because there isn't enough screen real estate available.

2) The adoption rate
We really don't know how many Q10s have been sold. It seems to be a reasonably good device, and there are BlackBerry fans all over the world, so it might have sold millions... or it might have sold 20,000. There's just no way for developers to get that information, which means it's not necessarily worthwhile to develop apps for it. My final May data won't be available for a few days, but in April, the Q10 accounted for less than 1% of my BB10 downloads. Now, that's not necessarily a fair metric since the phone wasn't out for the entire month and not all of my apps are available for the Q10, but when developer devices are accounting for an equal number of downloads, it doesn't fill one with confidence.

3) The money
This is perhaps the most important reason. There just isn't a whole heck of a lot of money to be made in developing for BB10 devices. Most of the other developers I know would consider themselves lucky to net $50/month from their BB10 apps. The BB advertising service is all but useless, and third-party advertising services just don't want to advertise on BlackBerry devices. I made more money from the paid version of GPS Data Master last month than I have in the entire history of the free, ad-supported version. For that reason alone, none of my apps will ever be fully free again. So, the lesson is if you want more apps to be available for your platform of choice, you need to be willing to pay for them.

All that aside, I'm gonna go ahead and make some changes to Word Scramble so it'll work on the Q10. God wills it! And who am I to argue with God?

Monday 27 May 2013

Drinki is Trending

I don't know what it means or how it works, but Drinki is trending on BlackBerry World. I guess cottage season has begun and a lot of people want to know where to go to buy beer, wine, and liquor in Ontario.


Get it while it's hot!

Tuesday 7 May 2013

April Data

It's May, and that means my April sales and download data is now available. It took me a few days to get it, which is why this post is going up so late.

Thanks to a couple new releases, overall downloads were up by 71%. BB10 downloads made up 28% of the total number, increasing their share by nearly 20% of the total.

49% of my BB10 downloads were on the Qualcomm GPU, 47% were on the Imagination GPU, 3% went to Verizon devices, and the remainder was split evenly between developer devices and the mostly unreleased BB Q10. Most of my apps aren't available for the Q10, so I don't expect its share to increase much in the future.

Location-wise, 16% of my BB10 downloads went to Canada, 10% to Indonesia, 10% to the US, 5.5% to Saudi Arabia, 5.4% to the UK and 3.8% to South Africa. US downloads grew as I expected them to, but Canadian and especially Indonesian downloads grew far faster than anticipated. I now expect that either Canada will remain on top, or Indonesia will claim the top spot for the month of May.

Sales were up a meagre 3.4%. Better than nothing, but considering I put out something new, it wasn't an encouraging amount of growth. BB10 accounted for 60% of my sales, which was in line with what I was expecting. Sales on BB10 devices were themselves up by 62%.

The US accounted for 25% of sales, Canada for 20%, Indonesia 12%, Germany 5%, with South Africa and the UK each taking around 4%.

At the current rate, if I don't release anything new and exciting, I expect Playbook sales to continue to drop, and to hit 0 within six months.