Now that the preliminary site for RIM’s upcoming application store “BlackBerry App World” is up, we’ve got a lot on our minds and we’re sure you do as well. Our first dose of shock comes from the pricing structure, which is absolutely horrible. To quickly rehash the image above, you’re looking at a nine-tiered structure that starts at $0, jumps to $2.99 on Tier Two and then adds $1 on each subsequent tier until tier nine is reached with prices capped at $9.99. Now, many people have expressed a great deal of sticker shock that paid apps are to start at $2.99 and we can’t help but agree that forcing such an expensive price floor is a practice that can only harm App World and interest in BlackBerry apps in general. With that said, we do understand that there are many forces at play that help dictate the price. Supply and demand obviously plays a role in but with roughly 21 million current ‘Berry users — many of them corporate/government/etc and restricted from downloading any applications — there simply isn’t that high of a demand as there is for Apple’s App Store or even Nokia’s upcoming Ovi store. Perhaps the supply side of things is affecting the price more so than demand. It is worth nothing that while RIM has been pushing its gear way further into the consumer market and more applications have come out (some pretty novel ones, we might add), the BlackBerry platform is not one that is easy to develop for.
More →
