New England BlackBerry Developer Meetup Group - First Meetup Notes

Last night I have attended local New England BlackBerry developer meetup group. It was a great event with nice turnout of about 50 developers with special guest - Mike Kirkup - director of developer relations at RIM.

Mike is a great speaker and a great guy in general. BlackBerry developers are truly blessed with Mike in that sense. So much has been done to ease up on the [intlink id="75" type="post"] hurdles of BlackBerry development[/intlink] recently that it is becoming cool to be BlackBerry developer once again.

The meetup was hosted by a local software development company - SoftArtisans. They develop SharePoint solutions for BlackBerry.

Mike was give the stage and he went over the BlackBerry super app concept which was similar to the [intlink id="136" type="post"]BlackBerry super app concept webcast[/intlink] he gave recently but a little different of course with some stuff oriented more towards developers.

The highlight was of course the free panel Q&A session which was afterwards. Mike, as usual, did a very nice job answering the questions of the many developers who brought up interesting questions.

Upcoming Products

• BES Express (or BESX) which is the free, striped down version of the BES server. This will allow smaller businesses to put their employees on BESX without hesitation which originated from the costs of licensing associated with putting employees on BES.
• [intlink id="168" type="post"]Upcoming WebKit browser[/intlink] which will be blazing fast and super blazing fast for JavaScript.
• There will be no iPad like device.

"No iPad, no BlackPad, BluePad, RedPad etc..."

• Advertising APIs. Right now RIM is conducting a closed beta with their partners and should be soon available to all independent developers. There is no cap on the volume, meaning pretty much anyone would be able to integrate advertising in their apps.
• Push APIs (well this is not an upcoming event actually, it went live today at 9am). Push API is available to everyone now and is free!
• App World 2.0 will soon be launched. The next version of the app world will support not only the PayPal but also the carrier and credit cards. The share of developers will most likely be different across all the optios and across the different network operators as well. PayPal option will remain 20/80% split with 80% going to the developers.
• In a few weeks the new Eclipse plugin for BlackBerry development version 1.1 should be released, which will address many issues existing in the older 1.0 browser. The official release of 1.1 which should go out of beta will be fully supporting 64 bit systems.

Upcoming Events

• Very soon we would have "fast simulator experience" so painful to many developers that when announced, it was followed by applause storm. So fast simulator experience means no more restarting the simulator to load the newly compiled version. (Yey!)
• More aggressive promotion of the App World. Mike mentioned that RIM intentionally kept the App World low profile for the first year letting the carriers figure out their distribution strategies.
• Super App competition. The super app competition will be carried out with a different prize distribution model than previously. RIM decided instead of rewarding a few leading application with big bonuses, reward more developers with moderate bonuses. Mike mentioned that they expect 3000-4000 apps submitted to the contest (both new and existing apps can be submitted) and if your app passes the first criteria of actually being a super app, then you are already entitled to something. Mike threw out "a free device" in the air but I guess it is not yet decided. They may go with a free device or maybe discounted developer conference or maybe we could choose. Let us know in the comments what you would prefer. The prizes will be handed out at BB Dev Con in San-Francisco at fall and the submission deadline will most likely be July 1-st but this is not confirmed yet.

The painful question of over the air (OTA) OS upgrade was raised and Mike said that carriers feel  fairly confident with pushing OTA OS update starting with OS 4.6 since 4.5 being the first OS where OTA OS was introduced had some issues and bugs. He mentioned that from carrier's experience OTA updates have a very high conversion rate. In the 80%-s while even the through browser+USB update is less than 20% conversion rate. Until most of the devices are 4.6 and up and carriers are more aggressive pushing updates to the devices, we will be stuck with the need to support older devices as old as 4.2.1. Which leads us to further interesting figures:

Update

You can read additional notes summary at Chris Wong's blog

You can download the Super Apps slides by Mike Kirkup which were presented at the meetup.