RIM Exec Calls Google Play “Chaotic Cesspool”

RIM Developer Relations Vice President, Alec Saunders has announced that a future BlackBerry OS update will take away the ability to sideload apps to the BlackBerry PlayBook in order to prevent the ecosystem from becoming a “chaotic cesspool” of piracy like Android’s Google Play Store. Sideloading an app onto the PlayBook is not an easy feat and requires several steps but in essence it can be used to pirate apps and load them up into the PlayBook.

Alec Saunders believes however that the reason why developers are not interested in working to develop apps for RIM’s platform is because they apparently have allowed users to bypass the official app store to and sideload apps onto BlackBerry devices. Saunders also mentioned that sideloading apps was allowed as a developer feature but people misused it by putting in pirated apps and he said again in a later tweet that in the next release of the BlackBerry PlayBook, they will be introducing a feature that will encrypt apps so they can only be run by the user who purchased the app. While this method is definitely something RIM should have looked into a while back, what remains to be seen is if this move will encourage more developers to head onto RIM’s platform and churn out apps for it.