Research In Motion Brings Developers Closer to BlackBerry 10

With the release of the “gold” build of its SDK among other moves, Research In Motion is bringing developers closer to its BlackBerry 10 platform.

BlackBerry 10 will offer a large catalog of the leading applications from across the globe and across all categories, including Games, Productivity, Social, Lifestyle and Leisure, Multimedia and Published Content, in addition to the applications designed for business and enterprise use.

The BlackBerry 10 platform has achieved Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) compliance -- FIPS 140-2 certification, which means that government agencies will be able to deploy BlackBerry 10 smartphones and BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 as soon as it is available. This marks the first time BlackBerry products have been certified ahead of their launch, RIM said. In addition, RIM recently announced that BlackBerry 10 smartphones have now entered more than 50 carrier labs with many more entries expected.

At the end of November, RIM and Appcelerator, which provides a mobile development platform, announced a partnership to offer mobile developers a number of incentives, including financial rewards, free services, and testing hardware, for creating BlackBerry 10 applications.

The incentives are open to Appcelerator’s ecosystem of over 390,000 developers, who have 50,000 applications deployed worldwide on over 90 million devices. Through the use of Appcelerator Titanium’s cross platform capabilities, developers and enterprises will be able to build and port their applications to BlackBerry 10, and Appcelerator indicates that developers should have the ability to reuse between 65 percent and 90 of their code as they port from other leading platforms to BlackBerry 10. Titanium for BlackBerry 10 shipped on December 7 in a prerelease version.

Incentive programs for developers will include that the first 1,000 developers will receive a BlackBerry Dev Alpha test device, once their application has been submitted for review on the BlackBerry World storefront. Also, up to 10,000 developers will receive one year of free Appcelerator Cloud Services (ACS) and Analytics, once their app is approved and available for sale on BlackBerry World. And applications that have been submitted can qualify for the BlackBerry 10k Developer Commitment.

Appcelerator Cloud Services (ACS) offers a fast and easy way to build connected apps with services including status updates, photo storage and social integration.

“As Appcelerator announced at the BlackBerry World 2012 conference in May, we are committed to delivering outstanding support for BlackBerry10 within Titanium,” said Sandeep Johri, chief operating officer at Appcelerator, in a statement. “In our quest to deliver native apps across all the major platforms, we are excited to roll out compelling incentives for Appcelerator’s mobile developer community, including the tools for building and bringing apps to BlackBerry 10.”

Meanwhile, RIM recently commissioned an independent survey intended to track developer sentiment, intent and conversations around writing apps for various mobile platforms, including BlackBerry 10. The results show positive momentum, in that developer attitude towards RIM has improved broadly and significantly. Indeed, 42 percent of developers surveyed said they would definitely recommend RIM as a development platform, a 25 percent over the previous poll.