Which BlackBerry Devices/OS to target? (July 2012)

Question

We have a fairly simple mobile application, completed for iPhone and Android that does the following:

• queries a web service to verify the user's account information
• display an animation to show that the user, in fact, has a valid account

We got the application working very quickly on a PlayBook by using the Android version.

Now the customer has asked us to explore getting it to work on other BlackBerry devices.

None of us know that much about BlackBerry, and the main source for our question returned from google searches (http://us.blackberry.com/developers/choosingtargetos.jsp) comes up as 404 page.

According to this chart there is still a wide variety of devices in use. Which ones does it make sense to target?

Thanks

Answer 1

I had posted an answer last year about this here on stackoverflow, but as you noted, that link has recently broken.

The only thing I've found that's similar is this BlackBerry developer page. It shows, for example, that paid apps are being purchased by devices that are about 97% on OS 5.0 and above.

From what you've told me, I don't know that your app is going to be that different on different devices, aside from maybe the obvious smartphone vs. Playbook difference. Different devices certainly have different screen sizes, so you'll need to make sure your UI is coded to handle that gracefully.

If you guys are new to BlackBerry, you might want to stay away from OS < 5.0. There are some things in prior OS versions (e.g. location services / maps, browser, and networking) that are a little tough to work with, and with such a small percentage of paying customers still on OS < 5.0, it probably isn't worth it to you.

So, I guess I'm recommending that you target specific OS levels (e.g. 5.0+). That will be a bigger driver for how you build your app, than a specific set of devices. This is because each OS version adds more and better APIs to use.

Once you've decided which OS to target, then you should download the SDK for each major OS. For example, if you use the Eclipse BlackBerry plug-in, you can install the 5.0 SDK (aka component pack), the 6.0 SDK, the 7.0 and 7.1 SDK.

Once you have those SDKs installed, you'll then have a bunch of simulators (each SDK has a simulator folder). Run your app on all those simulators, and that'll probably be a good start.

Of course, there's no substitute for running on real hardware, too, but if your app does mostly standard things (not interacting with hardware sensors, just displaying web pages, and making HTTP requests), the simulators should give you a pretty good test environment. They certainly will give you all the screen size configurations.