Hi,
I'm looking to develop a Blackberry app with storage. Since most of my data is structured, I was looking at using SQLite for storage. Since this is only supported by devices running OS v5.0 or higher, I was wondering if there was a significant portion of B'Berry market running v4.xx OSes.
Can anyone provide a breakdown of their market share? Is getting this stat even possible?
Thanks,
Teja.
I can only offer my humble opinion - I think that there are a LOT of 4.x still out there in corporate land - a much higher ratio than you will find in the consumer market. The reason for this is that corporate market turnaround is much lower than consumer market where it is less than two years.
So the real question is 'What is the mix in the market in your target audience.' If you are shooting for corporate - you definitely should support 4.x - if it is consumer - well, thats a different story.
Even the consumer market still has a TON of 4.x devices. Consider the fact that RIM only just recently released 5.0 and it's only available on a handful of devices. Handsets such as the Curve 8330 are still the most popular phone (business and consumer) and those are all still running 4.x.
So while it may be tempting to use 5.0 APIs to make your app development easier, you'll be cutting off a significant portion of your user base. It will probably take at least a year to see enough market penetration of 5.0 to consider it as a "lowest level" target OS. There will be a handful of "newer" legacy devices that will get 5.0 updates (for example the Verizon Storm is already running 5.0) but it will take some time for all carriers to test and make 5.0 available.
The BlackBerry® Bold™ 9700 and BlackBerry® Storm™ 9500 shipped with 5.0. Here is the list of BlackBerry® Smartphones that support an upgrade to BlackBerry® Device Software 5.0
Also, this article notes:
Not all wireless service providers will support BlackBerry Device Software 5.0 on all of the BlackBerry smartphones mentioned, as some wireless service providers will not carry all of these BlackBerry smartphone models, or might choose not to provide BlackBerry Device Software 5.0 for all of their BlackBerry smartphone models. Contact your wireless service provider to determine the availability of BlackBerry Device Software 5.0.
Tough call there!
The 5.x OS is being made availably only for a limited set of legacy devices. The choice of which model gets the upgrade and which doesn't seems quite random. Further, only a small percentage of (perhaps < 5%) of the users in consumer segment would be savvy enough to upgrade the OS. Even 12 months down the road there will be plenty of 4.x devices around.
I would keep SQLite for version 2.0 of your app. If there is a way, abstract out the storage layer so that you can bring in SQLite relatively easily. Again, tough call because perhaps the application you want to develop absolutely requires a more decent storage mechanism than the data structures available in JDE.