The odd ecosystem of DevAlpha apps

Last night I submitted a new app to BlackBerry AppWorld. This app was written in Cascades, and therefore only supports BlackBerry 10, which will not be released for another three months. This allows for a unique approach to the release of apps.

There is little to no point of having apps ready to go too much before the release of BlackBerry 10 in 2013, so there is very little pressure to have apps 100% ready to go at this point. As such the app I am releasing is actually not 100% complete. It is in good shape, but there are still a few more features that I would like to add.

So if the app is not yet fully featured then why am I ok releasing it into AppWorld? Because the only users who can download it are other developers. Given that the audience is exclusively developers right now, I can get an audience that is both understanding, and that is also capable of delivering some useful feedback for pointing which direction the app should go, as it gets finished up for the launch of BlackBerry 10.

I doubt that I will do this with most of my BlackBerry 10 apps, but I think that it will be an interesting experiment.