What it takes to become BlackBerry App World vendor

I am not sure what is the policy of RIM about it, but I don’t think this is confidential, since pretty much everyone can access this information while trying to setup an App World account. So here, we go:

What does it take to become an App World vendor:

1. You have to sign up and pay $200. Moreover, they will charge you additional $200 for every 10 submissions of applications, either it is just an update, or whether it was rejected by RIM – it will still count against your 10 allocated submissions, you bought for $200 initially and will need to pay afterward again if you used all 10. And there are quite a few cases when you use those. One which is the most ridiculous is the update.

2. If you are either individual or a company, in either case you will have to provide a proof of identity.

So 2 is not so bad, and quite understandable and acceptable — RIM was always centered around security. But 1? RIM, WAKE UP! Other platforms are doing so great because they have all those cool applications that are made by all those independent developers. Ease of development is the key feature to draw developer’s attention. So you have lousy development tools, lousy SDK and now you are charging roughly 2 times more than Apple charges and 8 times more than Google charges . And remember this is just to start with, and depending on how many applications you are putting and how often you update those, it can easily add up. There is also $20 fee for getting signing keys to be able to access signed APIs.

So you might think – yeah right, but the minimum price for applications on App World is $2.99 which sets a legitimate reason for developers not to charge less than that and basically prevents competition. Right? WRONG! Paid applications on App World are complete failure so far. No one is buying those except very few exceptions, which by the way fall mostly into the “stupid apps” (fart apps etc..) that RIM tried to prevent from infiltrating to the market by setting the minimum price to $2.99. Another evidence of bad judgment from RIM.

I hope they will realize those problems and limitations sooner than later, or otherwise they just might have trouble staying in business in the long run and when I am saying long run, in mobile world this is 2-3 years.

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