With the official launch of BlackBerry 10 a little over two weeks away now, RIM is frantically trying to get its App World loaded up with as many new and exciting apps as possible.
A recent Port-a-Thon event hosted by the Canadian manufacturer resulted in a boom of 15,000 apps being submitted to the store within a 48 hour period. The event promised incentives for developers who successfully ported an existing app from the likes of iOS and Android to BlackBerry 10.
Developers were able to submit up to 20 apps during the event at $100 per successfully submitted app, making it possible to snag $2,000 from RIM within two days. RIM also gave away 200 of its Dev Alpha phones, which will be exchangeable for the first official BlackBerry 10 devices when they go on general sale.
RIM of course held the keys to each developer’s fate, choosing which apps were allowed in to the store to be ready for the launch of BlackBerry 10 on January 30th and which didn’t make the cut. The company recorded an impressive 405 app submissions every hour for the duration of the event, which will help them reach a target of 70,000 available apps come the big launch.
At present it is thought that there is somewhere in the region of 120,000 apps waiting to be downloaded from the BlackBerry 10 App World, which is definitely a solid start. As many smartphone users will know though, quality of apps beats quantity, and big names are important.
The idea of these Port-a-Thon events is to bring apps that people already know about and will want to the new platform – people won’t want to switch from Android, iOS or Windows Phone to BlackBerry 10 if they can’t continue using their favourite apps, and RIM realises this.
Whichever way you look at it, the launch of BlackBerry 10 is looking set to be an impressive one. We’re very eager to get our hands on the Z10 and X10 phones when they launch and see what the App World has to offer – are you?