In App Advertising on BlackBerry with QuattroWireless, MillennialMedia, SMAATO and NexAge a bitter experience

Dec 16, 2010 by

Preface

At some point in the past I was trying to monetize free application on BlackBerry and since most of the advertising networks that actually work with BlackBerry don’t have an SDK, I had to work with their WEB APIs directly.

This did not work for me at all (with minor exception for Quattro Wireless). Maybe this was personal to me, I don’t know, probably not. The monetization through advertising on BlackBerry is unfortunately does not work. I am talking from a lot of experience supporting free applications with ads on Android and iOS.

I’ve spent a lot of time looking for advertising agencies working with BlackBerry and then signing up and then getting the necessary information from them and then working through their documentation to implement a custom web client to pull the info from their web APIs – all this to learn once again that the revenue I could get is a joke.

Quattro Wireless

Advertising with Quattro Wireless actually turned out to be the best BlackBerry advertising experience I had so far… As long as it lasted (not very long unfortunately).

Starting Sept. 30 1020 Quattro is iAd exclusive and stopped serving any ads to BlackBerry. Since I do not ever trust what I can get from advertising service, when the service stopped, the application was not impacted but other developers that were less careful (something you should not ever do though) might have had some problems.

NexAge

NexAge left me with the worst impression of all. First these guys at NexAge took a hell lot of my time with manual sign up and many  many phone calls I had to have with them to get anywhere. It looked very suspicious to me that they can’t implement an automatic sign up and to actually sign up for the service you had to talk to them over the phone. I should have known better at this point. Coupled with their awfully looking website, this fact should have stopped me from moving forward with them and saving a lot of my time and frustration. But since there were not many options at a time, I decided to try them out. The interesting part is that when I voiced my concerns about the manual sign-up to some higher up developer relations manager, he told me “We are the BMW of advertising, we give you a personalized and best service out there”… yeah… right…  After signing up with them and integrating their code (there were a few hiccups on the way but nothing deal breaking) I started to serve their advertisements and the results were – well… simply put horrible. When I talked to them they were not really helpful and they kept saying “we will investigate and will try to optimize”. I wonder if they are optimizing the ads manually as the sign-up. After couple weeks of my pilot with them, during which I wrote them and called them to complain about the ridiculousness of the revenue with not much results (they mostly simply ignored me) I shut them down and decided to forget about them and about the partial revenue I have generated in these couple weeks for the sake of my own mental health. I have to point out that they did have an SDK – a ridiculously large SDK, so I decided that I can not add an SDK which is almost as much as half of my whole application size, especially while I can implement the same thing with couple classes.

SMAATO

With SMAATO everything was much simpler, but the revenue was as bad if not worse as with NexAge. After trying them for some time and not seeing any improvement, I gave up on them.

MillennialMedia

With Millenial, it was more complicated. At some point I was simply furious with them and if there were any other options to advertise on BlackBerry, I would definitely avoid them, but since there aren’t I still work with them in a very limited capacity. I was so so sorry to learn that they are going to handle the technology side of RIM’s advertising service. The reason is simple – they are SUPER unorganized. And coupled with RIM, they just doubled the amount of mess. For example, they say you are ready to serve ads and you are fully operational and you publish your app and then you see some super weird stats and you ask them and they tell you some BS and then you wait a little more and then you ask again and then a few weeks later they say – “Ohh the ads you were serving are test ads”. To make things even worse – this happened to me more than once.

Summary

In summary, unfortunately, if you want to monetize your free application on BlackBerry – you better prepare yourself for the worst. I was hoping the official RIM advertising service will solve this problem, but unfortunately it didn’t. It’s a complete mess, as I mentioned and I don’t think they are going to sort this out any time soon. If you are a developer that knows of a better service – please let me know, I would appreciate it. Hopefully my experience also helps you to save some of your time. If you are eager to try anyway, I plan to post the custom integration code that I wrote here so that you (again) can save some time reusing this code.

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BlackBerry Developer Conference 2010 is tomorrow

Sep 27, 2010 by

BlackBerry Developer conference is starting tomorrow. I have arrived to San Francisco at noon today and just had a relaxing day browsing the sity, visiting the beautiful Chinatown and the Coit Tower from where you can see pretty much the whole city. It’s my second time in San Francisco, first time being here about 1.5 years ago for the Google I/O 2009 (so sorry had to miss it this year…). San Francisco is an interesting city and I like it, but it is a little dirty for my snobby Bostonian taste.

Anyhow, this is not about the city. BBDevCon 2010 is tomorrow and I am expecting it to be a turnkey for me, it was a long time of love and hate relation between me and BlackBerry. The platform is not evolving (yeah yeah, BB OS 6 – whatever… this is so 3 years ago) and in the super fast paced space as mobile, standing still is actually equals to moving back as everyone is innovating with the speed of light.

I will be looking for cues as to whether RIM will be able to at least maintain its current user base and improve his ways in treating smaller indie developers.

There have been rummors about BB Tablet – BlackPad, to be announced during the BB DevCon 2010. I am personally very skeptical about it, but we will see. Also – it is almost clear to everyone that RIM will announce it’s advertising API availability to the public – not great news though. They have the worst performing advertising so far, and this is one of the major points for me personally, if there is no promising (I am not even wishing for bright) future on the horizon, BlackBerry will be the last platform to receive any attention on my list.

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Is RIM going down?

Sep 20, 2010 by

For the last several month I’ve been thinking about the future of developing for BlackBerry and whether it even makes sense to bet on the BlackBerry OS. The learning curve for BlackBerry development is very steep, which makes it a huge hurdle for the newcomers to the platform, but works for the advantage of the companies and developers who already took the plunge and were swimming the quirky waters of BlackBerry OS for some time.

Read the full story here

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How to do a remote programming interview with code review

Mar 17, 2010 by

I’ve just read a post at Coding Horror – Jeff Atwood’s popular blog where he goes into the problem that many candidates applying for a programming job simply can not program. He claims that it’s almost all of the applicants, which I find hard to believe. I tend to think that their resume evaluation techniques are just not good enough, which is surprising since Jeff is good friends with Joel Spolsky who had an interesting article about screening resumes.

Anyways, Jeff’s article is not about that. It’s about a little nifty tool that will allow you to see other person type. It’s very simple you give your interviewee a link and open a link in your browser and can see everything the other person types with a couple seconds lag. This tool is definitely nice, but hell, why not just use google wave? It’s easy, many technical people should already have it. If the programmer applying doesn’t have it and doesn’t have a good reason as to why this is so you should think twice about putting further time and effort in the interview process.

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Android development vs. Blackberry Development

Apr 11, 2009 by

I was contemplating quite a lot about the title for this post. Originally I wanted to give it the title of “Why developing for Blackberry sucks” but then I thought it might be too harsh and does not really reflect the content of the post which is about comparing the experience of developing for Android and experience of developing for Blackberry and settled for the current title. There were other titles revolving in my head, but all of them were just variations of  the original “why developing for Blackberry sucks”

I have been developing for Android for some time and lately I have been working on developing for Blackberry and I must say development for Android wins hands down in all aspects. Many times, especially frustrated with Blackberry buggy IDE or other cumbersome experience I wanted to write this post, but I had to find the time for it.

So what is so bad about Blackberry development? It starts at the very basics – development environment. Google has developed a very nice plugin for Eclipse which works very well and even has the basics of support for visual editing of user iterface screens. RIM – the company behind Blackberry for a long time had their own development environment – JDE. Written using basic SWING components, there’s no need to mention how bare boned and outdated it looked. They have recently introduced Eclipse plugin as well, but it is pretty buggy and half baked. It is hundreds times better than the first version of the plugin, but it is still from being stable and feature rich.

Then we have the emulators – gosh, why do I have to restart the emulator everytime I want to test a new build? It can take up to a few minutes to restart the emulators for the more advanced models. To feel the pain, just imagine the nightmare of programming the UI for Blackberry in that setup. And no, there is no visual helper that can show the layout quickly, not to mention visual builder.

The compiler, or more exactly the packager – “rapc” has many times weird problems and behaves like a whiny child with lots of attitude problems. Same goes for the MDS server emulator.

Compared to Android, this can be nightmare. Yes I’ve had some issues and observed buggy behavior with aapt while developing for Android, but it was quite easy to resolve. For the UI part of the development, Android beats Blackberry as well. Constructing layout using XML is much easier than writing actual Java code. (Apple had actually went one step furthergiving the developers visual tools.)

Localization is much easier in Android as well. Besides conceptually being easy, the support of the Eclipse plugin for localization is half baked and buggy and what’s most important, it is not that easy to find documentation on how to implement localization for Blackberry in Eclipse.

The last but not the least (and in fact probably most important) is the vibrant, enthusiastic and active community of the Android platform. It is so much easier to find answers to any problems you have while developing for Android. I was a little considered about Android being all open source in a sense that there is no central authority with central responsibility for certain things, and Blackberry has all this and it turns out that what many enthusiasts can do, easily outweighs any size company organized or not.

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