Blackberry App World reach 3 billion downloads – Image Courtesy RIM Blackberry
Research in Motion, the maker of BlackBerry, has been the recipient of quite a storm of bad news lately. It reported bad earnings recently, which caused its stock to plummet. There is even talk that it has been looking for a partner to either finance it or outright buy it. You know how rumors get. Still, this is all news that flows out of the fact that Research in Motion has been losing its smart phone market share quite steadily to Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS. A number of observers are saying that the company looks very vulnerable. Its stock price recently hit $7.39. That is less than one-twentieth of the company’s value when it was peaking four years ago. How the mighty have fallen!
Research in Motion used to be the king of the hill when it comes to smart phones. Nobody could touch it. Its E-mail system and its powerful network are still greatly favored in the business world, but its grip as the smart phone market leader has continued to slip and it has definitely lost its glory. The question is can it recapture some of that lost glory? That is why the recent figures regarding its BlackBerry App World download figures stand as solitary rays of sunlight in an otherwise dim and bleak-looking future for the previous world leader in smart phone technology. RIM recently announced that it has past the 3-billion download mark for its BlackBerry apps.
What is really hopeful about that figure is that one-third of that 3 billion figure was achieved in just the past six months alone. That is an immense growth curve and it is a cause for hope for people that are hanging on to their BlackBerry mobiles or their RIM stock. However, to put in all perspective, to achieve that number Research in Motion is getting 2.5 million downloads a day. While that may be large numbers, especially for Research in Motion that is actually quite small when compared to the millions of downloads for Android and iOS apps. Still, good news is good news. It would be definitely interesting how Research in Motion fares in the next few quarters. It has been through so much bad news and it would definitely be interesting to see how it manages to leverage its network and its existing resources to map out a future for itself in the coming months.