BlackBerry knows that BlackBerry 10 needs more apps but how will it get them if developers see that the company’s market share is still deteriorating? In an interview with eWeek, BlackBerry vice president of global alliances and business development Marty Mallick said that the company was working overtime to fill in its app gap that still includes Netflix, Instagram and Candy Crush Saga, among others. At the same time, Mallick made note of all the apps that BlackBerry 10 now supports and promoted alternatives to popular apps that delivered similar functionality to the apps that the company is still missing.
That said, Mallick acknowledged that it can be tough to get on companies’ radars when they have a limited amount of time to devote to developing apps for different platforms.
“A lot of times the intention [to develop BlackBerry 10 apps] is there, it’s just their timeline,” he explained. “So a lot of our effort is showing them why they should prioritize it and helping to accelerate the timeline… and to the partners who aren’t there yet, our doors are wide open.”
While BlackBerry is no doubt working very hard to make sure it catches up with today’s hottest mobile apps, the real challenge lies in getting tomorrow’s hottest mobile app developers to make apps for BlackBerry the same way that they make apps for iOS and Android. After all, it seems as though a lot of mobile apps simply crop up overnight and it’s very difficult to keep up with the competition if you’re always scrambling to convince companies to bring their apps over to your platform six months after they’ve hit it big with your rivals’ operating systems.
And this really does seem to be the Catch-22 for BlackBerry: It can’t get more market share until it gets top apps more quickly and it won’t get top apps more quickly until it gets more market share.
