Developer Relations at RIM

A couple days after I blogged about some of the pain points I have been having with BB10 development, I received an email from Garett at RIM appologizing for the delays I had seen getting good replies on their forums and he offered to chat on the phone about ways they might be able to help.

Wow.

Yesterday I had an hour long conversation with Garett and he took a page full of notes on a range of topics. Some of the things were action items that he could address, others were things that he intends to pass on to people responsible for those areas. As an example, a trouble ticket that I submitted about the IDE hanging after a power outage was escalated the day after I spoke with Garett.

I find this kind of responsiveness rather incredible, and of course it is every developer's dream to have a dev platform company not only responsive but even reading blogs.

It's kind of humorous to contrast this with giant companies like Google. A few months ago I got an email from Google warning that I hadn't filled out the "Business Website" field for my developer account, and that if I didn't do so, they were going to remove all of my apps from the Android store. I followed the instructions in the email exactly, but the screen they referred to didn't have a "Business Website" field. I replied to their email letting them know about this, but didn't get a response. I sent a second reply a few days later, even including screen shots (I think), and again didn't receive a reply. Sure enough, Google did as they promised and removed my app from their store. A few months later, I got an appology email from Google and my app was back for sale, and the "Business Website" field was now where it was supposed to be.

So yes, a bit of a contrast there.