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Research In Motion, amid a Beijing stop on its BlackBerry 10 Jam World Tour, announced that downloads from its BlackBerry App World store have exceeded 3 billion. Its a happy milestone for the smartphone maker, which can use all the good news it can get.
Three billion app downloads averages out to over 2.5 million downloads each day, Victoria B. posted July 6 to the Inside BlackBerry Developer Blog. Whats even more importantand impressiveis that the number of daily downloads continues to increase. It took 786 days to reach the 1 billion mark, 210 days to reach 2 billion, and only 176 days to reach the 3 billion number.
She added, I should also note that this number does not include apps downloaded from third-party BlackBerry app stores, or those pushed internally at companies around the world, or those downloaded directly from the Web.
Also worth noting: There are now more than 90,000 apps available in the App World storeanother respectable metric, Victoria suggests, as other app stores often share their numbers of submitted or approved apps, rather than whats actually up for sale.
For context, Apple, at its Worldwide Developers Conference June 11, shared that it has more than 650,000 apps in its store and has passed 30 billion downloads.
RIM CEO Thorsten Heins talked up the BlackBerry 10 Jam World Tour during the companys June 28 earnings call, saying he was encouraged and excited by the traction BlackBerry 10 has gained with developers. At the time, Heins said that the 23-city tourwhich consists of daylong events to help developers become acquainted with RIMs new platformwas sold out in at least eight cities.
Developers have already embraced the BlackBerry 10 platform, showcasing apps at BlackBerry World in May, the camera integration, our first-in-class HTML5 browser and a social ability for apps beyond anything weve seen on a BlackBerry before, Heins said during the call.
Developersand excellent appsare the lifeblood of a mobile ecosystem, and RIM has its job cut out for it, not only keeping developers committed to the faltering BlackBerry brand, but encouraging them to stay committed even as RIM has pushed the release date of BlackBerry 10 from the fourth quarter of 2012 to the first quarter of 2013.
Youve got businesses to run, rent to pay and investors to answer to, Alec Saunders, RIMs vice president of developer relations, wrote in a June 30 post on the Developers Blog, acknowledging the effects of the delay on this important group. You are the folks who have skin in the game now, and arent just waiting for a new phone personally. We know this delay affects you, and were sorry.
Heins and his team have been working to make clear that BlackBerry 10 is an entirely new platformnot just a version updatewhich makes it an incredibly exciting but very time-consuming undertaking.
Could we have rushed it out? Probably, yes. But the point is, its a new platform for the next 10 years, Heins said July 3 on a Canadian radio program. We want it to be stable, we want it to be reliable, we want it to be of the highest quality.
When it was suggested that the company could go under by the time BlackBerry 10 comes out, Heins repeated, Please understand the size and the sheer amount of work that the teams are going through.
He went on to explain that he fully understands that the next six months will be difficult, but hes excited for what will come after that time.
Peter Devenyi, Rims senior vice president of enterprise software, similarly told eWEEK, We realize this is a difficult transition and we have incredible and inspiring commitment within our employee base to get us through, and tremendous confidence that as we get through this we will emerge as a much stronger RIM and well set-up to be successful through the course of the next several years.
Follow Michelle Maisto on Twitter.