Has Unity Abandoned BlackBerry Support?

Hey, I would like to know peoples thoughts on this?

Firstly there has been no updates to BlackBerry platform in any change logs for long time, I dont see much activity in the BB forum and feels like some bugs are ignored. My thoughts are because its such a small platform with few devices no point putting effort to support it??

Unity provide no stats for BlackBerry platform yet do for others?

Lack of plugins for BlackBerry, no prime31 or others?

Feels like everyone waiting for BB to die
But it lives on, releasing the Passport and Blackberry classic, I own a Passport as a second business phone and its pretty damn stable, only issues is Blackberry firmware keeps messing up shaders etc, lots of shader issues with Unity games and BB

What does everyone else think?

 

The thing is.. no one really uses any BB phones from our target segment, which is players. First it's been mainly a business only phone or has been in the past with such rep. I have never even seen or heard anyone use a BB phone in Europe from the people who I have worked in the past. At one point it required BB services to be hosted by operator or something silly to get all features working on the phone. Maybe it's decent if living in the North America where BB ltd or ex RIM has whole area covered with its services while else where its random or limited.

Personally I don't see it as a viable platform to use development/management time on even if they gifted me a BB phone. Some people don't bother even with WP8 and AFAIK BB is just a fraction of it when it comes to Unity supported phone models. Maybe there are no stats to share cause they would be too sad to see and would be bad rep for BB.

 

Thing is, see it from another view also; I use Unity to make money by releasing Mobile games, so why would I not make a BlackBerry version of my game after IOS and Android versions, just switch platform and some small tweaks, you be surprised how much extra revenue you will make from BlackBerry, this is why if you release a crap app on BlackBerry you still make revenue as no one develops for it and its not flooded like Android so you still can make a buck.

So this is why I need Unity to keep supporting this Platform as it helps business for customers.

 

Yeah I agree that there is a much higher chance to get decent revenue with BB sales than with Android. It's just that the platform is a mystery for many, they don't own such phones or don't see it that way which probably is a result of current situation. I haven't really seen much platform promotion for developers either if you for example compare it to WP (blogs, game labs, contests, evangelist posts etc).

I don't remember when BB was added as a platform but I remember seeing only one event or something where there was device give away or free lending or something and thats all for BB. For WP I have seen a lot of more in various places. This again might be a result of BB being such North American centric company while MS is so globalized.

 

There is no point to develop for BB anymore. There are no sales there. My apps do pretty well on iOS and Android but I think I made about .69 from BB last month. While it make be easy enough, it's just not worth your time.

Also, BB made the Google Play store available on their latest devices, I believe. If BB users want games, they can for the Google Play store.

 

Fair comment, its your choice after all, but I'm seeking some response from Unity team also to know if support will still continue or not so I can make future plans

 

Actually, my BlackBerry performance is through the roof...

On a game I made for a client
Stats for Downloads are:
iOS: 7,500
Android: 9,500
Windows Store: 12,000
BlackBerry 10: 27,500

On a game I made for myself I see more than 20 times the sales on BlackBerry as I do on iOS...

I put it down to the market not being completely flooded with games, although I consider my releases to be of quite high quality, they have 5 star ratings across the board.

 

Gulp...

How old are those stats? Is the recent or from a few years back.

My apps have 4.5 stars in all the stars.

 

What's your target demographic? I'd guess teenagers... not exactly the market of BB.

 

I don't know if it is still the case, but BB was incredibly popular amongst teenagers in the UK a year or two ago. They were sold very cheaply, and had a good keyboard. Useful when SMS was the cheapest form of communication.

Cheap but good Android devices and services such as WhatsApp might have changed that.

 

BlackBerry BBM was more popular than WhatsApp at one point, this was before WhatsApp existed. In America and UK it was the phone for teens, and the website crackberry.com is big online community you be surprised.

 

because it's low hanging fruit, like windows phone, no one wants to invest develop time/costs to the platform when it has less than 10% market... unless it is funded development (e.g. Microsoft Partner agreement)

http://www.shoutfest.net/2014/08/current-mobile-market-share-before-iphone-6.html?m=0

 

And less than 10% of the developers. It is a potentially interesting niche, as Jonny Roy has found to his benefit.

 

My stats are as of now, the thing is some Unity devs have apps with 1,000,000+ downloads, even 1 % of that is a hefty market.

Plus more to the point Unity list it as one of there deployment platforms for Unity 4.6 and Unity 5.0, it's in the 5.0 Beta and has been given all the new Unity 5.0 features...they just seem to be ignoring the BlackBerry forums and the bug reports for some weird reason.

 

+1 This is one the reasons I started the thread, still no official comments?

 

No, Unity has not abandoned BB10 support. The team that own this also own other platforms - there is not a dedicated BB10 team.

 

Ahh, I remember when BB was popular in my state. But not anymore. The colleges teach their business management courses by contrasting good business practices and innovations with BB lol. My final for MGMT 390 was a paper on "Why BlackBerry failed". It was actually pretty easy to write, sadly.

-The epic single point of failure authentication server that turns all BB devices into paperweights when down
-The failure to innovate on both design and features for the years they sat on the top of the market (pre-android times)
-The failure to make changes after android came out with new features and began to take over the market

A lot of their efforts are "too little too late", but it's nice of you guys at Unity Technologies to still have BB as an export option. I worked at a phone store and I can tell you at the height of their popularity (~circa BB Storm & Storm 2 release), they saw a decent number of sales every day. However, those numbers were still dwarfed by the less secure, less stables yet more entertaining Droid 1.

 

The thing is Graham, I have an open bug from June last year that's still causing issues, no responses from the team in the forums (yet the other smaller platforms, PSM, Windows Phone get much more care) They are not even issues that seem like a major problem to fix, just need people to take notice.

 

bug number: 615333

 

Seems I was correct all this time
Now the official response

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/discontinuation-of-unity-support-for-blackberry-10.332693/

I think its a poor excuse, if they solved all the problems and issues in one go and updated API then technically there would not be a need to make such a annoucement.

Does Unity know something we do not..

 

I think, if it's abandoned, is mostly because BB seems to be now more of a business platform, rather than platform for consumers. Plus BB AFAIK can run Android apps, so...

 

I see your point and agree, but for me now the issue is how to test Android apps on BlackBerry devices considering they have strange screen sizes

 

Get a blackberry, then test, readjust if doesn't fit, test again, rinse repeat?

 

I got the hardware! You say then test -> how do you load .Apk to BlackBerry!

 

This came up on top of google search results for "how to run android apps on Blackberry": http://www.cnet.com/how-to/the-easiest-way-to-install-android-apps-on-bb10/

 

I don't think the excuse is false or far from truth. They probably have editor and runtime usage stats for BB projects and they don't look good probably cause of the reasons said in first 5 posts. Also the BB forum section has been up for 2 years and only has 6 pages of post and oldest post in the first page being over 6 moths old... which is very low activity compared to the other mobile platforms.

 

I would have submitted games to blackberry if their submission process didn't involve having to send scanned images of your passport or whatever other loops you had to jump through. So I gave up.

But having completely no success with other miner platforms like the Kindle I would presume that Blackberry would results in hardly any sales either.

Who has a blackberry these days? What is it 2011?

Blackberry went a bit out of fashion to as it was linked to the London Riots of 2011.

 

BlackBerry should have been our argument against DRM before it was even tested in games. Such a terrible thing to do to consumers :c

 

So even Blackberry is giving up on BlackBerry, http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/11/8769185/blackberry-android-slider-phone

 

That would make me sad. I hated Blackberry for much of its existence, but I really love my Z10 with BB10 on it. The operating system is beautifully functional. To the point that I find it annoying when I have to use my iOS or Android devices for something.

 

I have pretty 2 of every device some 4 or 5, my two BB10 devices are the best hands down, so if they do go this root, hopefully it will be a custom Android, BlackBerry'd up to the hilt!

 

0.5% = 10,000,000 users...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...hone-share-stabilizes-at-about-0-5-under-chen

I get 10 times the downloads on BlackBerry that I get on iOS, paying users it's a pay only game.

 

You got me interested. Maybe I'll have another go at submitting to blackberry.

What sort of game is it?

Still 10 million users is not a lot. I have a free game with 250,000 downloads on Android. For blackberry that would represent 2.5% of all blackberry users downloading it. Not very likely.

 

If people are shipping games on BB10 and getting lots of downloads, then just stick with the Unity version you've been using. (And yes, I know there will be bugs, that might never be fixed.) If BB10 is removed from 5.2, which will come later in the year, then that doesn't stop you from shipping games today.

 

Hi Graham,

My concern is, we still have outstanding bugs from last year that cause major issue, I know they are being looked at, but as a low priority compared to other platforms, so now it's being dropped, will the bugs actually get fixed, will there be new bugs that will just get left... it's being dropped because developers didn't support it, did they not support it because of too many bugs deploying and porting which don't get fixed?

As I'm a beta tester, maybe I've been spoilt by the speed bugs get fixed for the other platforms...

Thanks for commenting though,

Jon

 

I'll see if some of the BB10 devs can contribute their thoughts here.

 

One big final bug sweep before 5.2 would be good then least we can leave the platform in a stable manor.
AlexThibodeau seems to be only developer working on BlackBerry platform, he is trying hard to fix the two major bugs left but I feel he is getting distracted by other tasks, please can we give him a bit time to finish of and nail the remaining BB bugs for a few of us who still develop on this platform.