BlackBerry OS distribution – July 2012

Jul 28, 2012 by

 

BlackBerry is quickly loosing its market share. Besides that it is failing to innovate, which is actually mostly the reason it is loosing its once lion market share so fast to Android, iOS and even to Windows Phone 7. Let’s check out how the OS distribution changed since January 2012. Here’s the post about BlackBerry OS distribution in January 2012

And here’s the BlackBerry OS distribution in January 2012.

*

 

***Note: This is not an official information or official numbers. These is a sample from one of the apps that run on BlackBerry and  have enough users so that it is statistically significant.

 

It is interesting to see that there is almost no change (well, no surprise here there were not many changes/upgrades in the realm of BlackBerry). It is interesting to see though that the 7.0 OS’s pie has slightly increased, surprisingly cutting the 5.0 OS’s pie. Or maybe actually it is not at all surprising. The 5.0 people have upgraded to 7.0 devices while 6.0 people did not bother (or could not) upgrade their OS to 7.0.

 

Here are the charts side by side:

July 2012 January 2012

 

Let me know in the comments what you think!

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BlackBerry OS distribution January 2012

Jan 19, 2012 by

Last year I’ve put some stats for BB OS distribution here: BlackBerry OS distribution March/April 2011

Beginning 2012 I was wondering what is the OS distribution now with the BB OS 7.0 devices in the wild and especially since I wanted to do updates only for the devices running BB OS 5.0 and up.

So the distribution looks like this:

Making devices that run OS below 5.0 to be about 5-6% of all the devices. Of course this data is based on the users who use this specific app, but I am almost positive that this is pretty close to the generalized numbers.

The numbers look like this:

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iOS vs. Android vs. BlackBerry vs. Windows Phones

Jan 18, 2012 by

Here’s the chart of smartphones market share according to market research firm NPD

Quite interesting trend can be seen by the end of the year with huge spike in iOS sales. This of course can be attributed to the iPhone 4S and the holiday season. Apple products are still considered luxury and make great gifts as opposed to say Android which is considered more of a necessity.

UPDATE:
Additional source (showing the same trend though) from Nielsen
***Note the shift in timeline. Otherwise the graphs correlate.

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Installing/Updating BlackBerry Eclipse SDK – problem with authentication

Dec 14, 2011 by

If you are getting an error similar to the error below while trying to install and/or update BlackBerry SDK as a plugin for Eclipse

An error occurred while collecting items to be installed session context was:
(profile=AppceleratorProfile, phase=org.eclipse.equinox.internal.p2.engine.phases.Collect, operand=, action=).
Unable to read repository at:
Unable to read repository at https://swdownloads.blackberry.com/Downloads/auth/contactFormPreload.do?code=
...

You are in luck!

Your problems are over as you found the solution. All you need to do is to clear the “Secure Storage” contents. To do that go to

Windows -> Preferences

Type secure, drill down to find the org.eclipse.equinox.p2.repository, expand this, and you will see the swdownloads.blackberry.com. Select this entry and delete it. This should resolve the issue next time you try to update/install the plugin you should be asked again for your credentials to the BlackBerry developer portal and once you put them in the installation should proceed normally.

Here’s how it looks in Eclipse:

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BlackBerry OS distribution March/April 2011

Apr 27, 2011 by

Just got an email from RIM with news and such and noticed the link to the OS center they run on their website to help developers choose which BB OS to target. After looking at the stats, I decided to make a comparison and see how the official stats from RIM differ from what I see within my applications.

Here’s the distribution published by RIM (dated March 3-d) I am not sure what they compiled into the March 3-d, i.e. what the timestamp of March 3-d actually means. Was it based on OS tracked for March 3-d, was it for last month, week or such. I couldn’t find that information.

And below is the distribution I have compiled from the data for the month of April 2011 (a month worth of data)

The breakdown by OS version is not identical but the picture is pretty much similar, except that my chart is much nicer I’ve got 6.1 devices (hmmm!) and the 5.0 OS section is a bit larger for my statistics than it is for the official statistics. But again, the official statistics are pretty much 2 month old now and actually since the rest of the sections pretty much coincide with the official statistics, I would assume that the number of OS 5.0 just got larger in these 2 month; which by itself is great news for BB developers. Hooray to that and I will try to keep up with statistics to see how the distribution shifts, maybe another post in couple month or when something interesting happens. Let me know in the comments if you’d like to see something like that in the future and whether it was useful for you.

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OTA on BlackBerry – how to detect OS version from the browser user agent

Mar 4, 2011 by

I do an OTA (over the air) distribution for BlackBerry. Some time ago, I wrote here how to setup the mime types for the OTA distribution on Amazon S3. Luckily now, S3 has got a new and very useful web interface, as well as improved mime type detection. They still get the file types not exactly right, but close enough so that the OTA installation for BlackBerry works on “autodetect” settings just fine.

This is however not about S3, this is about detecting the proper OS version of the BlackBerry OS from the user agent of the browser using a few very simple regular expressions.  The code is tailored to PHP, but you can easily adapt it to any language that supports Perl style regular expressions, or you can adapt the reg. expressions as well based on this simple idea:



       $agent = //get user agent raw string



        if (preg_match("/BlackBerry/i", $agent)) {



            if (preg_match("/6\.0\../i", $agent)) {

                $newRelease['os_folder'] = "6.0";                

            }            

            if (preg_match("/5\.0\../i", $agent)) {

                $newRelease['os_folder'] = "5.0";                

            }

            if (preg_match("/4\.7\../i", $agent)) {

                $newRelease['os_folder'] = "4.7";

            }

            if (preg_match("/4\.6\../i", $agent)) {

                $newRelease['os_folder'] = "4.6";

            }

            if (preg_match("/4\.5\../i", $agent)) {

                $newRelease['os_folder'] = "4.5";

            }

            if (preg_match("/4\.3\../i", $agent)) {

                $newRelease['os_folder'] = "4.3";

            }

            if (preg_match("/4\.2\.1/i", $agent)) {

                $newRelease['os_folder'] = "4.2.1";

            }



            //Form your download URL here



        } else {

            //This is not BlackBerry user agent

        }

Nothing complicated, but this should give a start point to any one tying to serve appropriate bundle via OTA.

 

If you were to use S3, then it would basically be:



// The main link to S3

$downloadURL = "https://s3.amazonaws.com/YOUR_BUCKET/releases/" . $newRelease['version_folder'] . "/" . $newRelease['os_folder'] . "/YourAppName.jad";

Post your thoughts/corrections in the comments!

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