Blackberry's impressive app stats avoid the bigger picture

Print

Posted 07 February 2012 13:50pm by David Moth with 1 comment

• Tweet

• Tweet

Blackberry's App World generates 43% more daily downloads per app than Apple's App Store, according to RIM's VP for developer relations Alec Saunders.

During his speech at Blackberry DevCon Europe today, Saunders also stated that App World has more paid downloads than the Android Market and clocks up 6m daily downloads, which equates to 30 apps per Blackberry user each year.

Overall, App World is second only to iOS in terms of profitability, generating 40% more revenue for developers than the Android Market.

This has allowed 13% of Blackberry developers to make more than $100,000 from App World.

But in cherry-picking these statistics Saunders is avoiding looking at the big picture.

If Blackberry users continue to download apps at a rate of 6m a day that will generate 2bn downloads this year, but Android users downloaded more than 7bn apps in 2011.

Travel website Kayak has also announced that it is dropping its Blackberry app as the device is "not working out to be a great channel for consumer mobile applications."

Kayak says that its audience of BlackBerry users "has been declining precipitously, and we can't justify the cost any longer".

The statement also says Kayak's entire engineering team has switched away from using Blackberry devices in the past few years, a move mirrored by oilfield giant Halliburton.

It has made the decision to move its 4,500 staff to iPhones as Apple offers the best capabilities and security.

While these two examples in isolation obviously don't signal the death knell for Blackberry, it does show a dwindling of support for the once dominant phone brand.

In addition, if we look at stats on mobile commerce, Blackberry is way below iPhone and Android in terms of generating sales for retailers. 

Apps probably aren't the best way for RIM to bolster the business in the long term. Blackberry Messenger is the only service that really sets it apart from other phones and last week RIM unveiled an updated SDK for the BBM Social Platform.

With 50m using BBM through various apps this is perhaps an area that RIM should be looking to exploit when it launches Blackberry 10 later this year.

David Moth is a Reporter at Econsultancy. You can follow him on Twitter.