An Exploration of BlackBerry 10's Programming API 100
Nerval's Lobster writes "BlackBerry 10 is completely different from previous BlackBerry operating systems — with good reason. Its core assets come from a company named QNX, which Research In Motion acquired in 2010. Blackberry 10 features include 'live tiles' that dynamically refresh with new information, as well as a revamped keyboard and security upgrades. But what really makes or breaks a phone is the quality (and quantity) of its third-party apps. Jeff Cogswell pokes through the BlackBerry 10 programming API in a quest to see what app developers can do with the platform, and how it compares on that front to Apple iOS and Google Android. His conclusion? Although some of the underlying components are showing their age, BlackBerry has 'spent a lot of time building up a foundation for a good development community.' He also goes over BlackBerry 10's viability for porting apps and building games. But will developers actually work with a platform with such low market-share?"
So where is the customer demand? (Score:4, Informative)
Our mobile app, we have built native for Android and iOS. We've had a grand total of one person ask for BB and one ask for WP8. We simply have no interest in investing the money to build for something no one cares about.
Re:Really want this to suceed (Score:5, Informative)
First of all, QNX is awesome.
It is. It's a real-time microkernel based OS. The kernel is about 60K bytes. All it does is manage memory, timers, and message passing. Everything else is in user space. There is a hard upper bound on interrupt lockout time, and it's around a microsecond.
This is what you want to control complex real-time systems that need tight coordination. All the Boston Dynamics robots, BigDog, ATLAS, etc. run QNX. The servo loops are running at 1KHz on those robots. Tight real-time coordination of all those complex motions requires a true real-time OS. (The robots that run ROS/Linux are more sluggish.)
But, after totally botched marketing, the death of the main designer, two sales of the company (to Harmon and then RIM), and transitions from closed source to open source to closed source to open source to closed source again, QNX, the company, has blown it.
None of this has any bearing on smartphone sales. They're not a hard real time problem. You could write the entire UI in HTML/CSS/Javascript and it would work fine on current processors.
Re:Garbage. (Score:3, Informative)
Source Link for you [yahoo.com]
Same study also found that "Android Market" was the most used, so it's attractive for volume (once your app is actually visible on the play store--as noted in the link I provided, that's the largest complaint about it).