“Themes” Start Showing Up in PlayBook App World

by Ronen Halevy on November 11th, 2011 · 2 Comments

Posted in News PlayBook

This one is a real head scratcher. RIM has yet to confirm or deny if developers will be able to theme the BBX OS like they can with BlackBerry 6 devices and earlier. Still that has not stopped RIM from opening up a new category in App World for the PlayBook for themes. The thing is the first “Theme” in that category is really just an app with some wallpaper options. The app is called “Christmas Themes” by Matthew Bailey for $1.99 which offers you multiple Christmas themed backgrounds for your PlayBook.

What do you think about this? Should RIM be marketing these in a separate “Themes” category?

Thanks Terrence for the pictures and other for sharing the news!

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DavidJAtkins.com ( View Profile) Newcomer - Posts: 6

Posted: November 11, 2011 at 8:47 AM EST

Oddly enough this Themes header has appeared all week – until today…

scuebydue ( View Profile) Master - Posts: 854

Posted: November 11, 2011 at 8:55 AM EST

David is right. It is gone now. Personally, I think it should go under a wallpaper or personalization group. It’s not really a theme.

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RIM Adds * Thank You Gift * Category to App World for Outage Apps

RIM said they would start offering the free apps that they promised to help compensate for the Outage last week and they started showing up today with DriveSafe.ly. Now RIM has a new category in App World called * Thank You Gift * just for these apps. RIM even sent out an email to developers that this category is for RIM’s use only saying:

We have added a new category in BlackBerry App World entitled ‘* Thank You Gift *’. This category is reserved for use by RIM only

If you put an app in this category, whether intentionally or not, we will deny it until you revert the category back.  Reapproving the app after you revert the category may take upwards of one week to complete.

So keep your eyes pealed on the * Thank You Gift * category for the latest in free apps!

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BlackBerry App World Hits 45,000+ Apps, Games, & Themes

Alex pointed out to us earlier this week that App World now has 45,000+ items available. That is a nice ramp up though I am sure they would want to hit 50,000+ for DevCon but that is probably not going to happen. The break down between the three categories for Apps, Themes, & Games works like this:

Something tells me the Android Player for the PlayBook is going to change those numbers drastically. On the other hand I don’t like reading too much into the numbers. Like the many other app stores, App World suffers from spam apps that really don’t belong together with apps or are duplicates of the same app. For example, 12,223 of items in the “Apps” category are in the Reference & eBooks section which translates into 10,659 eBooks in an App Store. In other words there are more than twice as many eBooks than games… I saw one eBook dev split up a book into three parts just to make it three apps…

Either way congrats to the App World team on hitting some more tonnage. Now we just need to boil down those apps to actually useful apps and forget the numbers…

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New High Level Apps & Games Categories in PlayBook App World

When I first saw this earlier today I thought it was a bug since I had some shoddy reception. I then had Mac ask me about it while Luis confirmed it for him. It seems like RIM is creating two high level categories in App World for the BlackBerry PlayBook separating Apps from Games. I know Android does that but RIM has only previously separated Themes from all other apps in the smartphone App World app.

Right now the icon for Apps is still not showing up so it seems like a work in progress. Either way I kind of like the idea of hierarchical categories since a huge portion of the apps in App World and many other app stores are games.

What do you think?

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