Developers are abandoning BlackBerry 10, survey says

If developers are the lifeblood of a platform, then RIM is about to be bled dry.

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According to a survey by Baird Equity Research developers are defecting from RIM’s upcoming BlackBerry operating system months before it even reaches consumers’ hands.

On a ten-point scale, developer outlook for BlackBerry 10 fell from 4.6 to 3.8. Unsurprisingly, the BlackBerry 7 story is similarly dire: Outlook on that front dropped from 3.8 to 2.8, which is slightly higher than the reported interest in HP’s semi-dead webOS.

Arguably more troubling, for the second quarter in a row, over 30 percent of developers said they have shifted projects away from Blackberry 10 to another platform. And where did those projects go? 72 percent of developers said they went to Android.

To make matters worse, BlackBerry 10’s interest numbers are only marginally higher than those for Adobe’s Air and Flash platforms, the latter of which even Adobe is dropping support for. Clearly, not so many people are interested in developing for RIM’s mobile platform.

While little of this is surprising in light of RIM’s persistent struggles, it does serve as further evidence that RIM has no one in its corner: Consumers, investors, and now even developers are abandoning the RIM ship, and at this rate there won’t be anyone left to steer it.

But in the spirit of Friday, here’s some good news: Developer outlook for all variants of Windows 8 sits at 6.3, a slight drop from the previous quarter but still a respectably high number. We may finally have a third horse in the smartphone platform race.

As for Android and iOS — well, they’re doing alright for themselves: Developers rated their outlook for the Google OS at 8.7, leaving Apple with its predictable crown at 9.3.

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