Are you an app developer, content provider, network operator or perhaps just love apps in general? Why not check out AppsWorld Europe being held in London at the end of the month? Although it's not BlackBerry specific there is definitely a lot of interesting things to learn and experience from attending. The event itself aims to gear up app developers in the process and issues with developing applications across the various app stores.
Some of the things to expect at the event are:
The developer and exhibition zone itself is free to attend but if you wish to participate in the workshops then there is a charge and you must pre-register for these. There are four workshops in all during the 2-day event - Operators & Handset Track, Marketing & Monetisation (one held on each day), and TV Track. More details of the agenda of these workshops can be found on the event website.
I was lured into PlayBook app development last winter by the offer of a free PlayBook. My motivations weren’t at all to make any money. To the contrary, I was firm in my belief that the app landscape consisted of big winners like Angry Birds who made back their investment 10,000 fold, and hundreds of thousands of apps that made < $200, making them not worth a developer’s time. (and not even close) I have a full time job which pays well, so my mobile app development is more about learning something new, and being a creative outlet that allows me to use a variety of skills, not just coding.
My first app, Baby Names for PlayBook, fits the trend of apps that make little or nothing, bringing in about 30 cents per day on average, for a total of $62 over six months. So far that equates to compensation of $4.50/hour.
But this is where it gets interesting: Purely as a learning exercise, I decided to implement Baby Names for BlackBerry phones, again not expecting much ROI. To my amazement, it has earned $1150 at a rate of $8/day, which translates to a compensation of $88/hour. And that is only the first five months of sales. If the sales rate continues at even half that rate for the next two years, the compensation rate might rise to > $300/hour. Clearly worth a developer’s time in that case.
Another financially positive experience was collaborating with my friend Graham Huber on a PlayBook app named Solicit. The idea was to make a polished looking app whereby you’d hand your PlayBook to someone you met so they could type in their contact information. That app has brought in $2/day for compensation of around $26/hour, and could rise to > $80/hour if sales continue at half the current rate for the next couple of years. (We are about to submit an update that allows you to upload contacts to Google Contacts)
For the sake of learning opportunity since then, I have implemented Baby Names on Android, which has compensated me $6/hour, on iPhone, which has compensated me $1/hour, Windows Phone, at $3.50/hour, and Chrome Web Store, at $0.25/hour. So there has been quite the disparity between my experiences developing for BlackBerry phones and these other platforms. (Which should be emphasized in this day and age of people claiming that developing for BlackBerry doesn’t make sense)
In terms of pure enjoyment, developing for PlayBook is where it’s at for me. It’s a beautiful piece of hardware (I do own an iPad as well), there is a need for apps, and the development experience for me with Flash has been far more enjoyable than Objective C. (I am fond of learning new programming languages, but yuck, I haven’t enjoyed my Objective C experiences so far) Because of this, most of my creative efforts since my first apps have been on the PlayBook, even though compensation hasn’t been anywhere close to my lone BB phone app.
I created Baby Paint, an app that allows a little person to swipe their finger around a cartoon drawing and have the correct color be placed under their finger’s path, kind of like those painting books I had as a kid that came pre-inked with the right colors. It has brought in $92 for compensation of $18/hour, not too bad if sales continue, but not great. A sports edition of that app, even a featured PlayBook app a few weeks ago, has earned $41, for compensation of $20/hour.
I collaborated with a friend Matt Langeman to create Learn Africa which has earned $25 for compensation of about $1/hour. (We can at least pump out apps for the other continents with little additional work, but it is not clear whether that would be worth it from a financial perspective)
A bit of a time sink was creating an app called Slideshow that would run alongside Voice Chat and allow you to start a slideshow, having the pictures display on both your screen and on the other person’s screen, in top quality, and be able to flip through your photos so that you can narrate your latest adventures with friends and family. It took a lot of hours to work out the kinks, 50 hours, and has so far compensated me a pretty rough $0.50/hour. I think it’s a compelling use case for the PlayBook, but one must realize that even ideas that we are fond of don’t necessarily generate a lot of interest. Perhaps if it was marketed well, it would have some legs.
More recently I have created Picasa Sync, which was the first app to be covered by a blog. That was a real treat. One of the most rewarding things for me as a developer is feeling like my creative efforts are appreciated, and blog coverage definitely has this affect. That app was only released last week, so it’s too early to tell what the compensation rate will look like. So far is has brought in $78, which is a good start for an app that took 7 hours to create. I have since created “Smug Sync”, an identical app for users of SmugMug, which is in the process of being approved.
So what conclusions do I make from my experiences? The most notable observation is that my first BlackBerry phone app has compensated me extremely well, much to my surprise, and so it would be interesting to make a few more phone apps to see whether that trend continues at all. On the PlayBook side, compensation rates have been much lower, but in a couple of cases they have been high enough that if sales continue it could be argued that my efforts will have compensated me well. All that said, I must conclude that the reason I develop for PlayBook is that I enjoy it. It’s fun to see a need and to try and fill it, to use both creative skills and technical programming skills, and to interact with and get feedback from users.
Future apps that I am considering: (feel free to sound off in the comments as to which of these if any you would find compelling)
Can I just say that, if I could go back in time, back to December 2010, I would have created a beautiful native email app for the PlayBook. That likely would have compensated very well, you might agree.
An interesting idea I’ve had is to create a site or even a forum post that proposes a number of useful PlayBook app ideas, and then users could vote which one they’d like the best. I would then implement the winning app. Encouraging this dialog between users and developers seems like a constructive thing, beneficial to both. At the end of the day, interacting with real people and having the satisfaction of meeting their needs is where it’s at for many of us developers. So in that spirit, let me know which of the above app ideas would be most useful to you, and I will implement the winning app and put it up for sale for 99 cents.
Tags:
More on BerryReview
October 3, 2011
June 6, 2011
May 19, 2011
October 25, 2007
Please enter your name
Please enter a valid email address
Please enter your message
Notify me of followup comments via e-mail. You can also subscribe without commenting.
Many have said that the PlayBook lacks apps, it seems that the app shortage is beginning to become a thing of the past. With some of the major gaming companies making their apps available for the PlayBook some educational apps have also made their way to it. The latest are five apps from Tvo which includes three free Apps and two paid apps.
Have fun learning your letters with Gisele, from Gisele’s Big Backyard, and her gooey alphabet soup. Gisele asks players for the first letter of objects she stirs up from her alphabet bowl. This is a phonics based game and it helps your child recognize and match letters of the alphabet, one of the skills necessary for learning to read. This game is designed for children ages 2 – 5.
TVOKids Get Growing Free : :Link
Get ready to grow a garden in Gisele’s Big Backyard with Tia. Dig a hole, plant the seeds, add some water and watch it grow! Get Growing is designed to entertain and educate, as well as teach children a little about patience! Fun game for ages 2 – 5.
A fun memory game that teaches children ages 2 -5 about the signs they encounter in their everyday lives such as stop signs, poison, do no enter, etc. Flip over a card to find the matching pair and have fun with Gisele and Robbie from Gisele’s Big Backyard while learning.
Help your child gain the power and confidence to read and spell with five unique games featuring The Amazing Spelling Fleas.
Beat the clock to gain more points or play in practice mode. These mini-games focus on the following expectations of the Language curriculum: spelling, vocabulary, reading comprehension and phonics. This learning App will teach your child to read without them realizing they are learning! They’ll be having too much fun. This game is designed for children ages 6-11
Using deductive reasoning and logic, your child will try to open all the blocks in the galaxy, but watch out for blocks with meteorites! If you click on a meteorite, your game will end.
Space Trek Galaxy encourages the use of trial-and-error and perseverance – two very important skills for learning in all areas of the curriculum. This game is designed for children ages 6-11
I am not sure how many companies are using the Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server but it just got an update this month. MiBlackBerry spotted the news on Google’s website along with a change log. It really just adds support for the latest version of BES along with:
Here is a breakdown of the features:
Support for BlackBerry Enterprise Server version 5.0.3
Release 4.0 of the Google Apps Connect includes support for BlackBerry Enterprise Server version 5.0.3. BlackBerry Enterprise Server version 5.0.2 is still supported as well.
Read-Receipt functionality
When the BlackBerry device gets a message that requests a read receipt, the device will prompt whether to send a read receipt, and whether to remember this setting. This feature is disabled by default. To enable this feature, set the following registry key: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Google Apps Sync] "ReadReceiptEnabled"=dword:00000001 This setting will take effect the next time you restart the Dispatcher and agents. If a user previously had set a BlackBerry device to deliver a read receipt by default, when you enable this feature the BlackBerry device will deliver a read receipt without prompting the user.
Free-Busy
When scheduling a meeting on the BlackBerry device, users can view free/busy information for other meeting attendees. This information may be cached up to 15 minutes. This feature is disabled by default. To enable this feature, set the following registry key: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Google Apps Sync] "FreeBusyEnabled"=dword:00000001 This setting will take effect the next time you restart the Dispatcher and agents. If this feature is enabled, free/busy will be visible for all users who share their free/busy settings with the Google Apps Connector user, whether or not those users share their free/busy with an individual user. As a result, users may see free/busy schedules in BlackBerry that they would not have permission to see in the Google Apps web browser, and vice versa.
If you are a Comcast subscriber, and a BlackBerry user you will be very happy to know that they have brought the XFINITY application to the BlackBerry platform. The application allows Comcast subscribers to take the best features of their television, internet and home phone on the go with them while on the go and stay connected from anywhere. The application brings tons of features along with it, for example:
A recent Neilson study that was just published confirmed a theory I have had for a long time now. In the app store wars it is all about quality over quantity. App stores may harp about having 250,000 or 350,000 apps but most users only really use a maximum of 5-10 apps regularly. According to Neilson this is the case for Android where:
"In fact, the top 10 Android apps account for 43 percent of all the time spent by Android consumers on mobile apps. The top 50 apps account for 61 percent of all time spent. With 250,000+ Android apps available at the time of this writing, that means the remaining 249,950+ apps have to compete for the remaining 39 percent of the pie."
So I decided to take a look at some of the top 10 apps reported in the Android Marketplace and noticed something interesting. Here are the top 10 Free and Paid apps:
Notice first that almost 40% of the “Apps” are games? Of the remaining 12 apps four of the six free ones are also available on BlackBerry in some form. Another 4 of the apps are only really applicable to Android (ROM Manager, Task Killer, Launcher, & Widgets). If you look at the full list of top 50 paid and free apps in the Android Market you get more or less the same story with a few standouts like Skype and Netflix along with a huge abundance of games listed as apps.
The other listing I found very interesting was the top grossing apps in App World. The second top grossing app in the Android Marketplace is Documents to Go. An app that now comes free on BlackBerry OS 7 and future devices which is nice. Most of the rest seem to be games. This really drives home a key point to RIM. Games are VERY important for users and when users are asking for “apps” it seems like they mean games. RIM is making some great headway on the BlackBerry PlayBook with games but the BlackBerry handhelds need the same treatment. BlackBerry 7 devices with OpenGL should help a bit but the QNX support for gaming SDK’s is key along with headliner games like Angry Birds. In terms of apps RIM needs to make a concerted effort to bring the top 50, 100, or even 500 apps to both BlackBerry smartphones and the PlayBook if they have not already done so. It seems to be a huge case of quality over quantity. App discoverability is also key for smaller niche apps and developers since many BlackBerry users and even Android users barely get past the top 50 apps.
What do you think?
PS: Keep in mind this Neilson study is about “Time in Apps” or how long you spend in them. Some apps like weather apps are very useful but you don’t spend a ton of time in them. Neilson also does not list out what top 10 or top 50 apps they are specifically ranking.
