I think it is time to admit what has been obvious for a long while now, that my time as an independent mobile app developer is over. I have not released updates to any of my apps in over two years now, and given the state of the market, I don’t really have the motivation to work on any of these projects in the near future.

The apps for the BlackBerry, Nook, and Windows Phone stores have long been inaccessible. And this summer when I let my Apple developer license expire, the apps for iPhone will disappear as well. While I will not be aggressively purging any other app stores, there isn’t much left that is compatible with the latest operating systems.

This has been a really fun project, (and for a few years a fantastic full time job). I am sure that there will be future software projects (even if they are more likely to be on the web), but until then I am getting enough coding in as part of my day job.

Thank you to everyone who supported me over the years.

When the BlackBerry movie was first announced I assumed that I would have a professional obligation to go see it, but then it has a extremely limited release and played on zero screens where I live. However, the film has since made its way to hulu and I finally got to see it last week.

I enjoyed the film, but when you are such an expert it is easy to get distracted by the little details that the movie gets wrong. Still most of this doesn’t matter, and the one thing the movie really got right was showing how good Mike Lazaridis and BlackBerry were at network efficiency and squeezing a lot out of the limited wireless speeds available at the time.

The big thing that movie got wrong as the (widely accepted belief) that BlackBerry was doomed following the launch of the iPhone. BlackBerry’s executives were correct in that the iPhone would overwhelm the 2G networks, and BlackBerry would find itself capable of making a touch screen. (Issues with the first Storm phones were not with the hardware as the movie implied, but with the software the only got decent half a year after launch). What actually put BlackBerry in trouble was the later launch of Apple’s app store. BlackBerry responded with a store of their own but didn’t preinstall it on new devices and was too deferential to the carriers and corporate CTOs to make it front and center the way they should have. I know it doesn’t work a biopic to spend too much time on a company’s short comings in the years after the founder left, but for those of us who were advocating for BlackBerry to make the right changes it can be frustrating to see everyone continue to learn the wrong lessons.