Research in Motion (RIM) was once quite protective of the Blackberry environment, preferring to develop their own apps for the mobile operating system. But now that the whole company is teetering on the edge of obsolescence, it has realized that help is needed, and fast. Now the company is courting developers to get into the BlackBerry system and it’s going to do it through incentives.
According to RIM vice president of developer relations Alec Saunders, RIM will give developers guaranteed earnings for the first year of $10,000 minimum. If the developer fails to reach that figure, RIM will pay the developers the difference. This is a very aggressive campaign to lure developers to develop apps for the BlackBerry 10. RIM needs to give out these incentives to entice developers to develop apps for the BlackBerry OS because providing a limited number of apps will not attract consumers to try out the new BlackBerry environment. But this is a high stakes gamble that could potentially cost the company more money that they could probably not afford to give out at this point.
RIM is going to implement a number of guidelines so that not any old app can just enter the system and get a guaranteed payment of 10,000. First, the app should meet certain standards of quality based on guidelines that will be checked by a third party entity. After passing this, the app will be brought into App World, the BlackBerry app store. Apps that fail to earn more than $1,000 over a period of one year will not be eligible for the payout. Only apps that earn more than $1,000 but does not hit $10,000 will get the payout.
Originally posted on May 2, 2012 @ 8:28 pm