Appcelerator Inks Deal with RIM to Reward Mobile Developers

By Meenakshi Shankar

TMCnet Contributor

 

Research In Motion, a company that revolutionized the mobile industry with BlackBerry (News - Alert) in 1999, has revealed its plan to work with Appcelerator, a mobile development platform provider.

This joint association will help them to offer mobile developers a number of incentives, including financial rewards, free services and testing hardware, for creating BlackBerry 10 applications.

'Developers and enterprises continue to look for robust cross-platform solutions and we are thrilled to work with Appcelerator to have Titanium support for BlackBerry 10,' Alec Saunders (News - Alert), vice president, developer relations and ecosystems, RIM, said in a statement.

Through the power of Titanium's cross platform capabilities, developers and enterprises will be able to build and port their applications to BlackBerry 10, and Appcelerator indicates that developers should have the ability to reuse between 65-90 percent of their code as they port from other leading platforms to BlackBerry 10.

As per the Incentive programs, the first 1,000 developers will receive a BlackBerry Dev Alpha test device, once their application has been submitted for review on the BlackBerry World storefront. Up to 10,000 developers will receive one year of free Appcelerator Cloud Services and Analytics, once their app is approved and available for sale on BlackBerry World, and applications that have been submitted can qualify for the BlackBerry 10k Developer Commitment.

'As Appcelerator announced at the BlackBerry World 2012 conference in May, we are committed to delivering outstanding support for BlackBerry10 within Titanium,' said Sandeep Johri, chief operating officer at Appcelerator.

'In our quest to deliver native apps across all the major platforms, we are excited to roll out compelling incentives for Appcelerator's mobile developer community, including the tools for building and bringing apps to BlackBerry 10,' Johri added.

Appcelerator will demonstrate Titanium support for BlackBerry 10 at BlackBerry Jam Asia in Bangkok, Thailand, November 29-30, and will host an on-site developer workshop. RIM also revealed its plan to offer training and support through a webcast beginning the week of December 10, 2012.

Titanium for BlackBerry 10 will be available on December 7, 2012 in a prerelease version.

In other news, Nokia (News - Alert) has laid the ground for a ban on sales of BlackBerrys in the U.S., U.K. and Canada, in a new wave of hostilities in the smartphone patent war.