Research In Motion executivess took the stage during BlackBerry DevCon Europe on Tuesday to clear up a few facts about the company’s success with its BlackBerry App World marketplace. RIM’s new CEO Thorsten Heins said BlackBerry App World is now home to more than 60,000 applications, which is a fraction of what’s available in the Android Market or iTunes App Store, and that BlackBerry devices are among the most popular smartphones purchased in the United Kingdom. RIM’s vice president of developer relations Alec Saunders also said that there are 174 million app downloads per month, or about 6 million applications downloaded per day, The Verge reported. Saunders argued that RIM’s BlackBerry App World has 43% more daily downloads per app than Apple’s own iTunes App Store and he said App World can be more profitable as well — BlackBerry apps supposedly earn about 40% more than their Android counterparts, and 13% of BlackBerry developers have made more than $100,000 from their apps. In addition to the app figures, Saunders and Nokia’s head of Qt announced that RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook OS now supports the Qt developer framework, originally intended for Nokia devices.

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Research In Motion on Tuesday announced a major milestone for its on-device software portal BlackBerry App World: 1 billion downloads served. ”The BlackBerry App World storefront launched a little over two years ago, and over that time, we’ve made many feature improvements, enhanced the look and feel, and added a ton of compelling apps,” RIM’s Alex Kinsella wrote on the company’s blog. “BlackBerry App World is now in over 100 countries, seeing an average of 3 million downloads per day, and we recently crossed the 1 billion app download milestone!” While the achievement is still impressive, RIM did confirm to BGR that the 1 billion figure includes application updates, however, and not just initial application downloads.

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When RIM launched the BlackBerry PlayBook earlier this year, AT&T was the only carrier that didn’t provide a BlackBerry Bridge application out of the gate. As of Friday, the application is now available for PlayBook owners with AT&T BlackBerry phones. The app provides free email, calendar, and BBM sync between your PlayBook and BlackBerry smartphone, but you’ll need to subscribe to a $20 monthly plan to share data, too. BlackBerry Bridge is available immediately for free in BlackBerry App World.

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If you’re an AT&T BlackBerry user and you bought a PlayBook, you know that BlackBerry Bridge — the piece of software that wirelessly connects your BlackBerry to your PlayBook and facilitates PIM functions — is not available for AT&T BlackBerry devices. Sure, there are unofficial workarounds, but for RIM’s largest customer to not support this critical feature for RIM’s biggest product launch in ages seems strange (RIM views carriers as customers, sorry guys). Despite its earlier statement, many thought AT&T had ulterior motives in not supporting BlackBerry Bridge, but we have confirmed that the real reason is that RIM didn’t deliver BlackBerry Bridge to AT&T until just days before it launched in RIM’s BlackBerry App World. RIM didn’t hand over a final OS build for the BlackBerry PlayBook until days before launched either, and we saw that first hand with the last minute OS updates to our review unit. In spite of the short testing time — and interestingly enough — all other U.S. carriers have approved BlackBerry Bridge.

Research In Motion has announced a new version of Twitter for BlackBerry that includes a number of noteworthy enhancements. Twitter for BlackBerry version 1.1 is officially out of beta and offers the ability to tweet your location using the “Add location to tweet” option. The app also includes push notifications for @mentions, and will auto-complete #topics as you type them out, along with several other minor enhancements. RIM also said the UI has been tweaked with updated graphics and includes a streamlined layout of the Add Photo and Add Location options. Lastly, the app has added language support for simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Polish, Czech, and Thai. Twitter for BlackBerry is available in BlackBerry App World now. Hit the jump for more info.

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Research In Motion on Wednesday announced a new version of its on-device software store for BlackBerry smartphones, BlackBerry App World. Version 2.1 brings several changes to RIM’s app store — the most notable of which is the introduction of an in-app payment mechanism. BlackBerry app developers will now be able to offer digital and virtual goods to users from within their apps, and payments will be taken and processed by RIM’s new payment service. A related SDK has been released to developers, allowing them to build the new in-app purchase functionality into their existing apps.

We were alerted to a blog post on Kik’s site just moments ago, and it seems that Research In Motion has not only removed Kik Messenger from its App World portal, but it has also disabled push services for existing users. We reached out to RIM for comment and here is the company’s official statement:

RIM became aware of a number of issues and customer concerns regarding the Kik app and service. Following discussions with Kik, the app was removed from BlackBerry App World on November 12. Upon further investigation, RIM concluded that Kik had breached contractual obligations. Based on the broad scope and seriousness of the issues and concerns, RIM terminated its agreements with Kik and withdrew RIM’s support for Kik’s service.

According to PhoneScoop, RIM is set to announce an update to their mobile marketplace application App World; cleverly named App World 2.0. The newest App World brings with it several new features which include: carrier billing, improved search, a more detailed “My World” section, QR code support, and other minor interface improvements. PS also reports the imminent launch of BlackBerry ID. BlackBerry ID is designed to, “help users manage their accounts more easily and transfer between devices and carriers if need be.” We have yet to see an official press release from the folks in Waterloo. What do you think?

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BlackBerry addicts, its officially time to freak out because BlackBerry Messenger 5.0 has just gone live in App Word. We don’t think we need to tell you what it’s all about because not only did we give the world its first look at the app, but its also been floating around for one hell of a long time. Well what are you waiting for? Let’s crash RIMs servers and call it a party! Hit us with your feedback, ok?

UPDATE: Looks like the servers really aren’t capable of handling the demand as we and a bunch of our readers are getting a “connection timed out” message. We’ll let you know once things calm down and everyone can be accommodated.

UPDATE 2: Looks like things are once again up and running.

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The good news: BlackBerry fans can finally get their App World fix on their computers. The bittersweet news: App World’s desktop experience is way better than its on-device experience. RIM has just launched a new Web-based version of its App World offering, allowing users to browse the catalog in its entirety from any desktop browser (or even a decent mobile browser). The new interface is awesome but it’s not all ponies and lollipops, unfortunately. There are plenty of things we’d like to see improved in Web-based App World going forward; most importantly, it needs to be better integrated with the on-device portal. Currently, when you find an app you like all you can do is email a link to your Berry. Lame. We want deeper integration — mark apps of interest on the website and they should automatically jump to a flagged page the next time you open App World on your device. There are a few other things we would like to see implemented soon but since the site is fresh out of the oven, we’ll give RIM some time to flush things out a bit. In the meantime, hit the read link to browse App World on the Web and let us know what you think.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

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If there’s one thing the world needs right now, there’s no doubt in our minds it’s another on-device application store. Lucky for us, LG seems to agree. The electronics giant has launched its mobile app store in Asia and is setting its sights on going global (Europe and South America, no US yet) by the end of 2009. The creatively named “LG Application Store” will see 1,400 applications right out the gate –  quite impressive for an app store at launch — with about 100 of those applications available for free. We can’t say we’re overly impressed with the ratio of free to paid apps, but anything is better than the selection of 30 that Pre users are currently forced to pick from. If and when LG’s offering makes it to the US however, we would expect the number of free (and total) apps to have grown substantially — pending some level of success of course.

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It has now been just over one month since RIM launched its answer to Apple’s App Store, BlackBerry App World, and we thought it would be a good time to check back in with our thoughts on the offering. Of course it’s way too early to reach any real conclusions as App World is obviously in its infancy, but we can still offer our first impressions of the portal, ping a few developers to see how they’re getting along and most importantly, see what you guys think about App World so far. So hit the jump for our thoughts on RIM’s on-device application portal.

The obvious jumping off point is to compare App World with Apple’s App Store. While Apple certainly didn’t birth the concept of an on-device app portal, it most definitely popularized the concept and spawned a new era in the evolution of content delivery. As things stand now, most would agree the App Store has the edge in most (if not all) areas. The reason beyond hype however, is likely the OS. The iPhone allows for a much richer experience on the GUI side of things, and its OS is much, much more spry. Installing an app on the iPhone takes mere seconds and what’s more, you can continue to use the phone while apps are being downloaded and installed. The BlackBerry OS is the polar opposite. Once an app finishes downloading you’re stuck staring at an hourglass — usually for several minutes — while the application installs. To make matters worse, a reboot is required half the time which adds another two to four minutes before you can resume operation. These are issues that have been present since the dawn of BlackBerrys and while they may be addressed some day, it won’t be in OS 5.0.

With that out of the way, we can look at how App World is faring in terms of getting content in front of the eyes of BlackBerry users. This, after all, is the name of the game. On the consumer side of things, App World is a tool that presents quality content to end users in a simple, organized and accessible way. In other words, it allows them to expand the functionality of their handsets in useful ways they might have otherwise been unaware of. On the commercial side of things, App World makes it easier than ever for developers to get their apps in front of a wide audience with minimal effort. The theory of course, being increased visibility will translate into more sales and therefore more revenue for both the developer and for RIM.

So the question becomes, is the advent of BlackBerry App World resulting in more downloads? Rather than speculate, we went right to the horses mouth (or mouths, as it were). We spoke to several developers over the past week or so and asked them a pretty simple question: How has your presence in BlackBerry App World affected sales/downloads so far? The responses we got were overwhelmingly and unanimously positive. Freeware and payware developers alike reported what can only be described as a dramatic impact on downloads. In no uncertain terms, BlackBerry App World is getting the job done.

As would stand to reason, 25 out of 25 applications currently found in App World’s top downloads list are no-cost downloads. The same can surely be said for any application portal. The value in App World for freeware app developers however, lies in the aforementioned increased visibility. As Jonathan Sasse, senior vice president of marketing at Slacker told us, the impact has not gone unnoticed:

We have seen a healthy increase of downloads of the Slacker Radio App since the opening of RIM’s App World. The uptake of our Personal Radio App for Blackberry smartphones has been truly impressive and there is no doubt that App World was instrumental in our reaching over 1 Million downloads.

Despite the understandably exclusive presence of free applications currently found in the portal’s top 25 list, the App World affect is hardly limited to just freeware. Pyxis Mobile, creator of Movela Netflix Queue Manager (formerly SmartFlicks), told us that RIM’s app portal has not only boosted sales but also provided a new source of motivation to diversify the company’s BlackBerry portfolio. Christopher Willis of Pyxis Mobile tells us:

App World has introduced our application to a whole new audience. Coming from only marketing Movela Netflix Queue Manager on the mobility blogs, RIM’s widespread marketing of App World, along with our ‘featured application’ status, has definitely accelerated sales. Based on the initial success, our team is working on a diverse pipeline of useful and entertaining BlackBerry applications that increase efficiency and provide value to users.

While App World still has plenty of growing up to do, it has undoubtedly been a success thus far from both the consumer and developer perspectives. Add some solid development on RIM’s end and work a few carrier deals into the equation and you’ve got yourself a powerful tool that will have a tremendous impact on the BlackBerry application market. That said, we want to hear what you think. Does App World serve its purpose in making it easier for you to discover and obtain new applications for your handset? Does it do so easily and efficiently? Sound off in the comments section below and if you’re a developer who hasn’t yet explored the opportunities App World provides, it might be time to reexamine your strategy.

Now that the preliminary site for RIM’s upcoming application store “BlackBerry App World” is up, we’ve got a lot on our minds and we’re sure you do as well. Our first dose of shock comes from the pricing structure, which is absolutely horrible. To quickly rehash the image above, you’re looking at a nine-tiered structure that starts at $0, jumps to $2.99 on Tier Two and then adds $1 on each subsequent tier until tier nine is reached with prices capped at $9.99. Now, many people have expressed a great deal of sticker shock that paid apps are to start at $2.99 and we can’t help but agree that forcing such an expensive price floor is a practice that can only harm App World and interest in BlackBerry apps in general. With that said, we do understand that there are many forces at play that help dictate the price. Supply and demand obviously plays a role in but with roughly 21 million current ‘Berry users — many of them corporate/government/etc and restricted from downloading any applications — there simply isn’t that high of a demand as there is for Apple’s App Store or even Nokia’s upcoming Ovi store. Perhaps the supply side of things is affecting the price more so than demand. It is worth nothing that while RIM has been pushing its gear way further into the consumer market and more applications have come out (some pretty novel ones, we might add), the BlackBerry platform is not one that is easy to develop for.

RIM is a very paranoid company and does not give developers too much access to the API out of fear that the security of the device, OS or servers will be compromised. This means that to create a good application, a lot of skill, time and money is required — costs that developers are more than willing to pass on to the end-user. In addition to this, to submit an application to App World costs $200, something we strongly feel should be done away with as it not only punishes those who are about to bring a great deal of money to RIM from all of their hard work, it will also serve to discourage hundreds of developers who have the skills but not the money to pay an exorbitant fee. Removing or drastically reducing this fee and having RIM bear the initial costs of hosting an app will certainly add downward pressure on prices.

RIM, buddy ‘ole pal, you need to look long and hard at a free market pricing system in which market conditions push prices to equilibrium. It can only serve to benefit us all.

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