When BlackBerry was gearing up to launch its latest BlackBerry 10 platform at the start of this year, one of the top priorities of the Waterloo-based company was to launch it with a decent number of apps so it could lure more users. The Canadian smartphone manufacturer promised that it will launch the next-gen BB10 platform with at least 70,000 apps and on January 30th BlackBerry fulfilled its promise. Two months after that BlackBerry was getting ready to roll out its all-touch Z10 smartphone in the US and the company made it known that they were looking to touch the 100,000 apps mark till by launch and it managed to successfully achieve the task for the second time as well. Now on Tuesday, May 14th during BlackBerry Live, BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins declared at BlackBerry World that the app store of the Canadian company, had surpassed the 120,000 apps mark.
This indeed is a great achievement by BlackBerry as it shows that BlackBerry World is growing with the passage of time. However, the app store from BlackBerry is still behind Google Play and Apple’s App Store when it comes to the number of apps. The rate of app growth in BlackBerry World has also slowed down, which must be slightly worrying for Heins and company but it seems that the CEO is still as confident as he was before.
Heins confidence could be judged from his statement to BlackBerry Live attendees on Tuesday morning. He said that, “We have reached solid ground with this company. Not only are we still here, we’re firing on all cylinders.”
BlackBerry’s vice president of global alliances, Martyn Mallick has also said that, “The response to the BlackBerry 10 platform and applications has been outstanding. Top brands and application providers are joining us every day and are seeing the benefits of being early supporters of the new platform. We constantly hear from developers that the BlackBerry 10 tools are easy to build with and that we provide opportunities for app differentiation that they do not see on other platforms.”
Nevertheless, to make BlackBerry profitable once again, Heins and company not only had to come up with a brand new ecosystem, but they also had to fire 5,000 employees and eliminate over half of the manufacturing sites. This was a plan that a majority of analysts thought was impossible to achieve. However, even with good results, the share price of BlackBerry is still struggling to gain momentum.
Let’s hope things will only get better for BB10 smartphone maker and one good indication is that 5,000 people have attended the annual conference of BlackBerry this year that is “slightly” more than the previous year, says company.
Source: TechVibes
Photo: CrackBerry
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