Whenever there's a Blackberry article on HN I'm surprised that almost nobody (neither in the article, nor in the comments) mentions the development environment. It is decidedly subpar. Now, I don't know for sure whether developer tooling makes a big difference to the success of a company, but I suspect it does.
I mean, the whole thing requires you to use a PC, and it insists you run in Windows XP compatibility mode if you want to use the simulators (which you only find out by trial-and-error). And even then the simulator stops working every ten runs or so. OK - so you want to run on a device instead? Well, not if the code signing servers are down you don't (required for every build). And that's just the tools - we haven't even started talking about the SDK.
It's time to revise your old biases. You're talking about tools for the old OS. The BB10 development tools are much nicer, and people are finding them easy to work with[0]. Since the OS is built on QNX, the simulator is now just a VMware image that boots into QNX directly. Oh, and you don't need access to a signing server to try out your own code. (And I think you sign files yourself when they go out to other people.)
Since BB10 isn't even done yet, it hardly seems fair to call these ideas "old biases". It might be time to revise those current biases once the thing ships.
Sure, but the point I was trying to make was that the (maybe historically) cruddy toolset will likely have contributed to the decline of the platform, and nobody seems to mention that.
If they've improved the dev environment for BB10 then at least they're doing what they can in that regard. Hopefully it's not too late.
My company develops for Blackberry as well and it is a mess. Our BB client lags far behind on features compared to our iOS/Android offerings and not for lack of development time. We spend triple the amount of effort developing for BB.
As an example, compare the Blackberry offerings in java.util:
These are BASIC utilities classes that form the basis for all your java data structures. When you start comparing other areas of development (deployment, UI development, etc) it looks even worse for Blackberry.
It really is their approach to getting 3rd party developers on board that has let them slip as far as they have. Their devices are still great and the keyboards are very slick.
What he/she said is only true of the dev tools for the old BlackBerry OS. The dev tools for the new OS offer a far wider variety of languages to choose from, and no require developed to run windows if they don't want to.
Is it still that way? I quit developing for BB 2 years ago, and at that time the tools were indeed horrible compared to what Android and iOS had to work with. But I know some friends still working in the BB field, and they told me the BB10 tools are supposed to be completely new and better.
I mean, the whole thing requires you to use a PC, and it insists you run in Windows XP compatibility mode if you want to use the simulators (which you only find out by trial-and-error). And even then the simulator stops working every ten runs or so. OK - so you want to run on a device instead? Well, not if the code signing servers are down you don't (required for every build). And that's just the tools - we haven't even started talking about the SDK.