BlackBerry 10 gains 15,000 new launch apps...maybe

Computerworld is reporting that RIM's two BlackBerry 10 "Port-a-Thon" contests, held over the past weekend, resulted in 15,000 ported apps submitted for the BlackBerry 10 platform in about 37 hours. The two "Port-a-Thons" encouraged app developers to take non-BlackBerry 10 apps and port them to the platform, offering cash rewards (starting at $100 per app) for ports that pass RIM's approval.

The "15,000" count, confirmed in a tweet by RIM Vice President of Developer Relations Alec Saunders, refers specifically to the number of application ports submitted by eager coders, not necessarily the number of successful, approved ports the contest produced. According to the contest FAQ pages, the actual usable count of applications from the contest will take at least a week to be determined, as RIM must vet each app before declaring it "approved."

There were actually two separate halves to the Port-a-Thon contest: one focused on porting Android apps and the other on porting non-Android apps. The non-Android contest spread the net quite wide, being open to apps from a whole slew of sources (including Appcelerator, Maramalade, Sencha, jQuery, PhoneGap, Qt, AIR, Enyo, and previous versions of BlackBerry OS), while the Android contest was, as the name implies, strictly for Android apps. The story with Android apps is a bit muddled, though; as we noted in our BlackBerry Playbook 18-month revisit, RIM has made the porting process from Android to RIM's tablet relatively straightforward, so Android apps which have previously been ported to the PlayBook were ineligible for the contest.

The high level of community engagement is good, and developers churning through 15,000 apps in a single weekend is certainly a sign of interest in the BB 10 platform, but it's not all wine and roses for RIM yet. Creating incentives with cash and a deadline to port over as many apps as possible doesn't necessarily make for quality work or extensive testing on the ports. Far more importantly, however, is that pure app quantity does not a healthy platform make: careful curation of stunning launch apps counts far more than thousands of duds and duplicates. RIM knows this: they have bet the farm on BlackBerry 10's launch, and so we're hoping when BB 10 hits the streets in a couple of weeks that it has an array of excellent, vibrant applications waiting to be installed and used.