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?

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!

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.

Drinki

Click the logo to get it on BlackBerry World

Have you ever needed a bottle of wine on short notice, but didn't know where to go?

Do you need a special event permit and don't know where to get one?

Are you up at the cottage and wondering exactly when the beer store closes?

Then Drinki is the app for you!

Now you can find the locations of LCBOs, Beer Stores, and Wine Racks all across the province. Search by city, GPS location, or just find the nearest open store. Then you can check its hours, find it on a map, and get driving directions all from the palm of your hand.

Searches happen completely offline so you don't waste time or bandwidth. Find a location as fast and as easily as possible, then save it to a list of favourites, so you can check it out even faster!

*This app is not endorsed by or affiliated with the LCBO, Beer Store, Wine Rack, or the Government of Ontario. Please drink responsibly.

March Data

It's April, and that means my March download and sales data is ready to go.

Despite March having three more days than February, my overall downloads were down 7.3%. However, BB10 downloads increased from a 1.85% share to a 8.32% share of the overall number. More of my free apps were available for the platform in March and even more are available now, so I expect the share to increase with time.

In March, 72.5% of my BB10 downloads were on the Qualcomm GPU, 2.4% were on the Qualcomm GPU for Verizon, 24.2% were on the Imagination GPU, and the remainder went to Dev 10 devices.

Canada accounted for 43.6% of my BB10 downloads, followed by the US at 12.4%, the UK at 9.8% and India at 4.7%. Considering that the Z10 was only in wide release in the US for nine days, I find its numbers rather encouraging, and expect it to challenge Canada for the number one slot in April.

On the sales front, my overall app sales were down by 1.7%. However, the share of sales that went to BB10 devices increased from 22% to 38%, and BB10 app sales were up by 65%. 75% of sales were on Qualcomm GPU devices, with the rest going to Imagination GPU devices.

Canada accounted for 60% of my sales, followed by South Africa at 9%, the US at 7% and India, the UK, and Jamaica each with about 4%.

It would seem that the Playbook is continuing to die as a platform while BB10 is on the rise. If current trends continue, more than half my sales should go to BB10 devices this month.

BB10 Sales Data

BB10 phones have been out for around a month now, so I thought I'd present my February sales data to give some indication of what developers can expect.

Now, not all of my paid apps are available for both the BB10 and Playbook platforms, but enough of them are that I feel it's close enough to make a comparison.

So, in February about 50% of my app sales were to Canada, 25% to the UK, and 15% to the US, with the remainder distributed across other countries, mainly in Asia and Europe.

Of my total sales, 78% were for the Playbook, and 22% went to BB10 devices.

Of my BB10 sales, 85% were on devices using the Qualcomm GPU, and 15% were on devices using the Imagination GPU. 78% of sales were to Canada, 15% were to the UK, and the rest went to India and South Africa.

On a month-to-month basis, even though February has three fewer days than January, sales were up about 40%.

It's only been a month, but these numbers lead me to be cautiously optimistic about the success of the BB10 platform, and my own success selling apps for it.

The $10k Developer Commitment

In preparation for the launch of their BlackBerry 10 phones and OS, RIM is running what it calls the $10k Developer Commitment. The gist of it is that they wanted to have as many apps as possible available at launch, so to encourage developers, they made the following offer: If your app is available on launch day and achieves a minimum of $1000 in sales over the course of the next calendar year, then RIM will top you off to $10,000. For example, if you had sales of exactly $2300, they'd give you $7700. This seems like a pretty good deal until you get into the details.

In order to qualify for the $10k deal, your app must receive the Built for BlackBerry designation in time for launch and retain it throughout the calendar year. So, if they change the rules partway through the 12-month period and you fall out of compliance for a period of 120 days, then you get nothing, regardless of how much your app has already earned.

Further, the total amount available for disbursement is only $10 million. Assuming an average payout of $5000, that means only 2000 developers will get anything. If you manage to creep above $1000 on January 29, 2014 but the fund is already exhausted, then you get nothing.

Of course, the real issue is qualifying for the Built for BlackBerry designation in the first place. The list of criteria covers seven areas from 'User Benefits' to 'Security'. I submitted 'Awesome Sudoku' just to check out the process; I didn't expect it to pass, but I wanted to see how the approval process works. It took so long to get any feedback that I wound up submitting pretty much everything I've made for BB10 regardless of my expectations of success. Then, when I finally did get a response, it wasn't terribly helpful. I got an email this morning telling me what changes I could make to qualify. It included the following three bullet points:
· Improved game play

· Better graphics

· More Feature(sic)

As far as I can tell, that basically translates to 'Make your game better'.

Now, Awesome Sudoku is by no means the most exciting app out there. It's sudoku; there's only so much you can do. However, it's polished enough that if its sales translate from the Playbook to phones, it should cross the $1000 barrier. So, I have to wonder just exactly what the point of the $10k Commitment is. If my little sudoku app can clear a thousand bucks, anything with enough flash and pizazz to qualify for BfB designation should easily cross the $10,000 mark on its own.

Ultimately, I think it was a good way to attract developers, but I don't think the program will turn out to be terribly good for the developers themselves.