Skyfire puts its BlackBerry plans on ice

By on Apr 7, 2010 at 7:33 PM
Software April 7, 2010

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Oh dear. It’s no secret that out of all the major mobile platforms, RIM’s BlackBerry OS is the easily one of the most difficult to develop for, but even with that in mind, we didn’t see Skyfire completely abandoning their BlackBerry client, even if they haven’t worked on it in months. In a blog post Wednesday afternoon, Skyfire’s CEO, Jeff Glueck, announced that his company has ceased all work on the BlackBerry version of their popular browser in order to focus on Android. Citing a poor developer environment with inconsistent and fragmented APIs, Glueck apologized to those who have been eagerly awaiting the release of the browser while vowing to return to development provided BlackBerry OS 6.0 delivers on RIM’s promise to bring much needed improvements from a developers perspective. Of course the release of OS 6.0 will see RIM release its WebKit-based browser, but then a little healthy competition is good for us consumers, right?

Thanks, Chris!

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  • http://www.maemo-freak.com christexaport

    What most of you are overlooking is that Blackberry’s app runtime architecture is immature and too limiting for most robust applications. This is similar to Mozilla’s initial prognosis of Android in regards to Fennec development, before Google added a NDK for Android. Now development is moving along, albeit slowly.

    This type of thing is what irks so many techies like myself that listen to people say “Symbian is outdated”, “WinMo is dead”, “blah blah blah…”, and assuming UI/UX is the most important indicator of an OS’ robustness, maturity, etc. If you notice, Skyfire and Firefox are both available for Symbian and WinMo for years now, and mainly because the application runtime support was very advanced and mature, with good APIs and access to deep layers of the OS.

    Blackberries use a Java based runtime for apps, which is so last gen. Android has a one year old C++ ecosystem and its Java based Dalvik engine, which is as nascent as you can get. WinMo HAD robust runtimes, but ditches most of them for WP7 in exchange for C++, XNA and Silverlight, which are still quite robust, just new to the mobile arena. Apple has a proprietary but well documented ecosystem. Nokia uses Qt, GTK, Python, Ruby, Flash, WRT, and Java.

    So you can see which OSes are the most robust, and see that UI ain’t everything.

  • http://www.maemo-freak.com christexaport

    once more complex mobile apps become available, and data sharing across apps more important, it will expose the true state of development of these platforms.

  • Ams1393

    BB 9780 

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