Our buddy Kevin spotted some details about the upcoming Application Storefront in the latest BlackBerry Developer newsletter. There is some good and bad news but mostly bad. The worst part is that there will be no support for selling themes initially. That sucks since themes for BlackBerrys are extremely popular.
RIM will be allowing you to submit web applications to the store so expect quite a few homescreen launchers in there along with Web Signals. Developers will have to pony up $200 for every 10 applications submitted into the store so there is definitely some barrier to entry. This is disheartening for free application developers but hopefully RIM will make an exception for them.
Technical support will be handled by the developers but since the applications will be sold worldwide I hope devs can keep up. The prices in the app store will include USD, CDN, GBP, & EUROS at launch and prices will automatically be translated between them.
All in all those are quite a few rules for a storefront. Personally I think the exclusion of themes is a bad move but maybe RIM is just trying to keep the number of applications and submissions they need to approve low at launch.
Check out more details in the newsletter
via CrackBerry
DavidB Not Registered
Posted: February 20, 2009 at 8:05 AM EST from my BlackBerry 9530
Maybe that theme policy will change when there’s a non-beta Plasmic for devices that will be supported by the store?