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?

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