Tyler Lessard on how BlackBerry developers can take advantage of the company's new services.
It's a big week for BlackBerry developers, with Research In Motion introducing new APIs including in-app payments, geolocation, advertising and push notifications – that can be compared to the leap forward Apple made with its iPhone 3.0 software earlier this year.
But is that all it is – RIM playing catch-up with iPhone? Some of the applications shown off during yesterday's keynote session hinted that it could go deeper than that. ME sat down with Tyler Lessard, VP of global alliances and developer relations, to talk about what the company is up to.
“There's a common thread running through these different types of apps, of wanting to focus on interactive and engaging user experiences that are leveraging the power of being always connected,” says Lessard, citing Xobni and LinkedIn – both shown off during the conference – as prime examples.
“At this time, users are adopting and migrating to smartphones for the first time, so their expectations are being set around what sorts of services and apps they're going to use. We're certainly seeing users zooming in on the 5-10 main trusted sources of content that they're going to rely on on a daily basis.”
This ties back to something Lessard said during his section of the keynote session at the conference, about developers needing to think not just about how many downloads their apps do, but about how often they're then used - engagement.
“With the new services – payments and location and push – there's a common thread,” he says. “We know developers need to make money, but the question is how can they deliver a service that users believe is worth paying for, and more importantly, that they'll continue to pay for.”
He cites news apps as a good example – that people expect to get news apps for free, but might be happy to pay on a monthly basis for more advanced features. “Things like push are key to that,” says Lessard. “They help developers build a more compelling service that they can justify charging for.”
One interesting announcement yesterday focused on RIM's new advertising service, helping developers to put ad units in their apps from a range of networks without having to work with different SDKs. Lessard says it's an attempt by RIM to improve the “less-than-stellar” performance of mobile advertising, but he stresses that it's not an attempt to control which ad networks developers can work with.
“Vendors can work directly with ad networks or providers, they're absolutely free to do that,” he says. “There are brands out there who have existing advertising relationships running across all their platforms, so to expect them to move to a mobile-only platform would be unrealistic.”
RIM's position right now is interesting. On the one hand, it's showcasing apps like those from eBay, Loopt, Xobni and LinkedIn that dig into the native capabilities of BlackBerry handsets. Yet on the other, its new services for developers also bring it into line with iPhone – particularly for in-app payments and, on the gaming side, OpenGL ES.
In other words, RIM is walking the line between stressing the unique aspects of BlackBerry, and pitching it to iPhone developers as a good platform to port their games and apps to.
“We're trying to make BlackBerry more approachable for a wide variety of developers,” he says. “That includes people working on mobile apps on another platfom, as well as going broader with the partnerships we're doing with companies like Adobe, targeting the desktop or consumer content developers.”
However, he says RIM isn't just on the hunt for iPhone ports. “It's not about 'how do I port this over', it's about what the ultimate killer experience would be for their users,” he says.
“LinkedIn and eBay have both taken that clean-slate approach to what the experience should be, and they were both very impressed and surprised by the level of integration they could achieve.”
Meanwhile, connectivity and that buzzword-du-jour – cloud – are increasingly important to the BlackBerry world, yet Lessard is keen to point out that it's not technology for technology's sake.
“The question comes back to what is the value of services that are sitting off the device,” he says.
“Are there unique things those services can do because of where they're running? It's not about cloud services for the sake of cloud services, but about where there is truly additional value brought by having services running over here rather than on the device.”
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