Thoughts from BlackBerry World 2012

Last Tuesday (May 1, 2012), I had the privilege to be on stage during the keynote at Blackberry World 2012 in Orlando.  I was there to announce our strategic relationship with RIM to bring support for Blackberry 10 to Titanium, something we've been working on with RIM for several months.  Sitting back stage in the "green room" before my talk, I was very impressed with what I was hearing and seeing from the other participants and from RIM itself.  

RIM clearly understands the importance of BB10 to its future and definitely understands that the key to their success lies directly on the developer community and how apps are built for the platform. I won't rehash all of the public comments about RIMs demise, you can read them for yourself.  Frankly, I believe RIM knows better than anyone what is in front of them and the speed at which they must bring BB10 to the market.  Also, given the dynamics of the mobile market, I wouldn't yet count RIM out.  I have seen a number of great innovations in the BB10 product that I think will impress users and help them differentiate against both iOS and Win8.  Of course, I think that BB10 likely already has a better UX/UI than Android, but that's for you to judge.

At Appcelerator, we have seen a quarterly drop in developer interest in Blackberry each time we've done the Appcelerator/IDC quarterly survey - however, it's still a top platform at this point.  From an inbound interest stand point with our customers, potential customers and partners - we've had plenty of interest.  In a lot of geographies, Blackberry still is the #1 choice for a lot of businesses and app developers.  We took at this quantitative and qualitative data in to place when we made the decision to work with RIM on BB10.  As a mobile app platform company, we believe we must support all the platforms that our developers want to build apps and mobile web sites for.  However, from a practical standpoint, we have to prioritize our time and energy in platforms we believe will remain important.  We believe RIM has an opportunity to remain a very important player in the overall mobile OS ecosystem.

So what's next and when's the availability of Titanium with BB10 support?  Right now, we've been working with RIM engineering making great progress on the implementation and we're excited to see the work they've done with the new Cascades UI framework as well as the new tooling that supports OSX (Big Plus!).  We have the V8 based runtime working well with BB10 and Titanium and are busy implementing all the APIs.  As RIM gets closer to a public beta of BB10, we'll be able to provide a build to the community that you'll be able to use.