As if BlackBerry wasn’t already having enough trouble wooing developers and getting top apps on its BlackBerry 10 platform, a new report suggests things are only going to get worse. BlackBerry announced earlier this week that it is exploring a sale of the company as it looks for ways to reverse course, and Forbes contributor Ewan Spence believes the news will probably scare developers away. This would be awful news for BlackBerry and its users, of course, as the company’s app store is already so barren compared to rival platforms.
“Third party application support is already weak on BlackBerry 10, and the announcement this week from the company will have a chilling effect on developer support for the platform,” Spence wrote. “With iOS and Android always likely to top the list of ‘supported platforms’, there is arguably only space for one more platform that can be supported with any real sense of purpose.”
Spence concludes that Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform is now the go-to third mobile ecosystem for developers looking to branch out.
“Microsoft always said that Windows Phone would be the third ecosystem,” Spence wrote. “It looks like the last competitor to that title has thrown in the towel.”
