The other thing that BlackBerry AppWorld needs to do is to open up paid apps to more countries. Being able to sell apps in Brazil, Australia, Indonesia, New Zealand, and South Africa would open up a much larger market.

1) A billing relationship with the customer is *critical* — you definitely hit on that point. However, what incentive does the customer have to establish a billing relationship with RIM? Either RIM needs to give them some kind of killer app (analogous to iTunes) that facilitates this or RIM needs to partner with someone who already has a billing relationship with the customer (could be the carrier, or more interestingly, I’d say the best fit is Amazon.com). There needs to be significantly less friction through out the process.

2) While companies like MSFT and Google are facing fragmentation challenges RIM is a unique position because it controls the hardware and software — that means they are uniquely able to ensure consistency across their family of devices in a way that MSFT and GOOG could only hope. In the case of Android, Google has the benefit of allowing different “flavors” of Android (analogous to Linux distro’s) to compete and then seeing the market / app store standardize around the winners. RIM doesn’t have this leeway b/c they build all of the hardware + software and need to maximize sale of both today.

3) It might be worth while to point out that RIM’s minimum price point is a benefit to developers in a sense — it helps to alleviate some of the downward price pressure on apps by raising the price floor to $2.99.

4) Totally agree about distribution of app world; the last thing you want constraining your app consumption is installation of the app store itself.

Not to go off on a tangent, but BES5, as cool as some of the new feature are, is a nightmare – we’ve had non-stop problems with it, so really, I think RIM has bigger problems to worry about, like getting their software under control already, both on the device and server side.

And for Developer Tools, I’d agree a big problem is device consistency – no one wants to develop apps that won’t work across the board, and even worse, no one wants to test them, especially in smaller shops where dedicated QA resources might not exist.