logoalt Hacker News

stackghost11/07/20242 repliesview on HN

Shitty dx is baked into RIM/Blackberry's institutional DNA.

I had a long conversation with their engineering people way back before BB10 came out. At the time you had to apply to get access to the full blackberry SDK, and IIRC you also had to sign an NDA. Meanwhile Android and iOS were in full swing and wouldn't you know it, the platforms that had better developer experience, that prioritized making it easy to write apps, were successful.

Blackberry is just institutionally incapable of handling this sort of relationship with the community. It's that legacy telco "us vs them" mindset at the top of the org, and it filters down whether implicitly or explicitly.


Replies

baby_souffle11/07/2024

It was worse than an NDA! You also had to start your application with a trip to a notary to get your ID confirmed.

And if their signing servers were down…You couldn’t load had just compiled onto your own dev / test device.

I loved using my blackberry but I hated developing against it. Bb10 was its own little adventure but had similar draconian dx

show 3 replies
cmrdporcupine11/07/2024

From the people I know who worked there, same crap in internal culture, too.