Interview with Waldi Wepener
Research In Motion, the makers of the Blackberry phone held a Miniconference in Nairobi's Laico Hotel with Application Developers on 29th September 2011. The Mini-conference was to try and improve the relationship between Mobile App developers and RIM. The Team was led by Waldi Wepner, Regional Director for East, Central and West Africa, Colin Abouchabki Head of Business Bevelopment, Africa, and Michael Weitzel, Technical Manager. I managed to catch Waldi to ask some questions regarding Appworld, and other technical issues.
Me: Is there hope of overhauling the developer app store? Having to authenticate every session does not make sense
Waldi: We have a short to medium-term roadmap for enhancing BlackBerry App World™ and adding new features to the store. We share this information with the media and our public as we improve our offering. The time-out mechanisms and passwords in BlackBerry App World follow industry best practices and ensure the integrity and security of transactions and information.
Me: What are they doing to encourage developers to develop apps?
Waldi: We encourage developers to work on the BlackBerry® platform by providing them with a massive customer base as well as by supporting industry standards and offering access to a rich, easy to use and cost-effective development environment.
BlackBerry® smartphones are the leading smartphone platform with over 70 million BlackBerry users worldwide, offering developers a large potential audience for their products and services. We offer powerful software development kits and application programming interfaces for smartphone developers, as well as the ability to work with technologies they are familiar with such as Java.
With the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet and its QNX operating system, we aim to make things even easier for developers by supporting standard technologies such as HTML5 and Flash. This points to the future for our platform as robust yet flexible and open development environment that is extremely easy and attractive to work in.
Soon, developers building for the Android platform will be able to quickly and easily port their Android Java apps to run on BlackBerry PlayBook tablets using simple tooling to repackage their existing Android Java application, code sign and submit their Android apps to BlackBerry App World.
Continued on the next page
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