Research In Motion has been accused of failing to connect with ordinary smartphone consumers, but there's another set of personal relationships that are a liability for the company. Turns out that app developers are abandoning BlackBerry to focus their energies on where the growth is: the iPhone and Android operating systems.
Developers say that the variety of BlackBerry models and specifications make creating apps a lot of work with little payoff. One app maker says that he gets 20 times more downloads from iPhone users than BlackBerry users. Still, it's BlackBerry's anemic growth that is driving developers away, not complicated requirements. The once-dominant handsets accounted for only 13% of global smartphone sales last year, compared to 20% last year. Meanwhile Google and Apple continue to gobble up more and more market share.
It's just another round of bad news for RIM, which last week warned that its quarterly revenue could see a drop for the first time in nearly a decade. The company is in the midst of making unspecified layoffs among its 17,500-member staff.
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