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BlackBerry's latest platform BB10, on which it launched its premium Z10, touch-based smartphone boasts of over 70,000 applications. This is the largest number of applications for a BlackBerry platform, at launch.
The company also says that an app developer can post apps much faster than in their earlier platforms. “Earlier, developing an app would take 10-12 weeks. On the new platform the time has crashed to 2-3 weeks. So, the costs of developing an app has also gone down,” said Anne Matthew, director of alliances and business development at BlackBerry.
The platform allows applications frameworks based on C++, Adobe and HTML5. “You need not worry about what technology you know to decide what can be developed on BB10. It can be done with whatever skill-set that a developer has,” said Matthew. She says that a lot of existing code of the platform can be used as well.
Porting applications from one platform to another has also become very fast, the company claims. “An existing Android Java application would take 20 minutes to port. These are unheard of timelines,” claims Matthew.
The platform of BlackBerry is a complete open source like Android which has over two lakh applications. However, some components of the platform have been made open by the company, as it monitors the applications very closely.
Internationally, the company has a budget of $100 million (Rs 5,420 crore) for application development. “This for handholding the app developers, expert attention, providing devices to developers,” said Matthew. The company has also conducted events like hackathons and portathons for app developers.
Matthew says that Indian representation in application development has been huge. At a recent portathon which had a total 16,000 applications, half of them were from India. Additionally, BlackBerry claims that it has provided to support many applications in regional languages as well.
“The platform supports ten Indian languages like Tamil, Telugu, Bengali and Punjabi, in addition to Hindi,” said Matthew.
