Netflix has no plans to support BlackBerry devices


Netflix has no plans to support BlackBerry devices in the future, Reuters reported Friday. That includes the recently updated BlackBerry PlayBook, Research in Motion's beleaguered tablet released in 2011.

As shown above, the company made its intentions, or lack thereof, clear in a response on Twitter to a disgruntled PlayBook owner on Thursday. Netflix is available on both iOS and Android, the two dominant mobile device platforms, as well as Windows Phone, which has a small but growing market share. Despite repeated attempts to attract the attention of developers to its AppWorld, it looks like RIM won't be able to win over Netflix.

One possibility remains: RIM has tried to make transitioning Android apps to its App World as seamless as possible, and provides a packager and SDK for Android apps as well as plugins for Android development tools. None of the tools are a guarantee that the app will work flawlessly on the BlackBerry side, but it also means that companies don't necessarily have to develop for the BlackBerry platform directly to have a presence in App World.

RIM's presence in the smartphone market has continued to fade over the last few months, capturing only 4.5 percent of new smartphone buyers in the US over the last three months of 2011, according to a study. The PlayBook has yet to meet with retail success, though the company is still behind it: version 2.0 of its operating system was released Tuesday.

No comments:

Post a Comment