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How many versions of Blackberry apps we have to make?

There are basically two issues that are confusing us:

  1. Will a Blackberry app made for mobile phones work on the Blackberry tablet? I see that there is a tablet SDK as well.

  2. Do we have to make a separate versions of Blackberry app for different mobile phones?

The reason we ask this is because we come from the Android environment where we can use one SDK to make app which will work on all mobile phones and tablets as well.

Solution

  • The BlackBerry Smartphone SDK is different from the BlackBerry PlayBook Tablet SDK.

    The smartphone applications are written in Java (RIM's version of J2ME, essentially), while for now, there are two editions of the PlayBook Tablet SDK: WebWorks, for development with web technologies like Javascript, HTML, and CSS, and one that is Adobe Flash/Actionscript/Air based. I think there is also one in development with C++ as a foundation.

    You can start with the BlackBerry Developer zone - it covers development for both smartphones and tablets:

    http://us.blackberry.com/developers/

    The BlackBerry Tablet SDK for Adobe AIR can be found here: http://us.blackberry.com/developers/tablet/adobe.jsp

    The BlackBerry Tablet WebWorks SDK can be found here: http://us.blackberry.com/developers/tablet/webworks.jsp

    Information about development for the BlackBerry smartphones can be found here: http://us.blackberry.com/developers/javaappdev/

    For smartphone development, you would probably want to target the minimum RIM OS that would include the most devices owned by your target customer base.

    Right now, RIM claims that more than 96% of BlackBerry smartphones can be reached using SDK 4.5 or higher.

    RIM keeps an up-to-date set of statistics on this: http://us.blackberry.com/developers/choosingtargetos.jsp

    Typically, if you're targeting recent devices (4.7 and newer), then you don't need to worry about splitting your code to target multiple devices, as long as the UI is written without making any assumptions as to screen size, etc.

    If you're targeting anything older than 4.7, then it may benefit you to make two versions - one for touch screen devices, and one for devices that aren't touch-screen. The touch-screen API is introduced in 4.7, and while it's somewhat backward compatible, in our experience, while you need the touch-screen API available for devices that support it, it's best to leave it out for older devices that do not have support for the touch API or the virtual keyboards that come with it.

    If you're going to split the code, RIM's compiler does come with a C/C++ - style preprocessor which comes in very useful.