As Research In Motion opens up the BlackBerry platform, providing new features and integration between third-party apps and core BlackBerry apps, ZDNet UK spoke to RIM's Alan Brenner, the general manager for the platform.
We asked Brenner how BlackBerry competes in the crowded smartphone app market, how the handset manufacturer expects to work with developers, and what the key challenges are for the company's mobile platform.
Q: Where do you think the new APIs and the integration into core BlackBerry apps put the BlackBerry as a platform, compared with other smartphones?
A: The important point is that we're different; we have a different approach from what you're seeing elsewhere in the market. This notion of enabling deep integration is distinctive, and it speaks to our traditional strength as BlackBerry — which is we make the applications work together, and their functionality is orchestrated around users' needs and tasks and objectives, rather than [around] the features of an application.
It's that focus on collaboration among the applications that we think is the most interesting aspect of what we're trying to enable developers to do. That style of platform architecture is very interesting to many developers.
The thing that has fooled most of the industry about mobile computing is it is sui generis; it is not just an extension of the computing architecture and models and programming paradigms of the desktop. Look at most of the other platforms out there — they remain in many cases very clever adaptations of traditional desktop computing models to mobile devices. I really think we're different.
BlackBerry is a full-blown mobile experience, because what's distinct about mobile is the constrained usage, the constrained input-output models, the time and attention constraints — you're mostly doing it out of peripheral vision. So the workflow in BlackBerry apps — the BlackBerry flow story — is more applicable to mobile constraints than the conventional desktop [models], because they require too much work to get across the applications to implement a particular task.
In mobile devices, all apps are peripheral; there are no sovereign applications. The desktop is built for sovereign apps by and large. The web is kind of different; the web is kind of a 'tweener'.
When you say BlackBerry 'flow', is that a reference to the idea of 'flow state', where you don't notice time passing, but you're getting a lot done?
Which is how BlackBerry is. We definitely think of 'flow' for both reasons. Once you're up to speed on using BlackBerry, the flow of the user's attention drifts across the apps, and they don't even notice it. It also connotes the way APIs enable the apps to transfer control and data between themselves.
You've talked about offering 'information in context'. This comes out of the location and the estimated time-of-arrival interface you're offering, based on your Dash navigation acquisition, and the integration between BlackBerry and third-party applications. That's a powerful idea, but is it something developers are interested in working with? Is it something users want?
The Dash algorithms mash up historical and real time and crowd-sourced data. Think of the things you can do with it.
This is the beauty of the context model; practically everybody we explain this idea to, within a few seconds starts conjuring up these opportunities... I can't think think of a better catalyst for an enthusiastic, engaged, productive developer community than the notion of 'context'.
The announcement we made [at the BlackBerry Developer Conference] is a first round of initiatives to catalyse the 'context' thought process in our developer community. I don't have anything more to announce, but you can imagine that we're motivated...
