During his opening session keynote at Mobile World Congress 2010 today, Mike Lazaridis introduced the concept of a “Super App”, representing a new class of mobile applications that make you wonder how you ever lived without them. I wanted to provide more detail and context around this class of mobile applications and to share some of my thoughts on how you can make your application into a Super App.
Super Apps are the kinds of apps that people love, that they use every day because they offer such a seamless, integrated, contextualized and efficient experience. Our developers are able to build in that enhanced experience because of the unique capabilities of the BlackBerry platform.
The BlackBerry platform provides APIs and services that are designed to help apps become stickier, more intuitive, more engaging and more valuable to users, while being as efficient as possible on the network and battery life. For example, apps can be “always-on”, running in the background and listening for specific events, waiting for inbound data, triggering notifications or quietly waiting for the right time to spring into action. Apps can add custom menu items and data to the Inbox, Address Book and Calendar and can be called into action immediately from those, and other, apps on the device – always one-click away. Apps can leverage true push technology to deliver “just-in-time” data that can result in audible notifications, customized messages in the inbox, local databases to be updated, or whatever else needs to get done. Check out our new Super Apps page for ideas on how you can leverage these capabilities in the BlackBerry platform to build an app worthy of the title “Super App”.
We are very excited about the power of Super Apps on the BlackBerry platform and will be devoting a lot of time and effort here on the BlackBerry Developer’s Blog talking about how developers can get started building Super Apps with sample code, tutorials and a variety of other hands-on resources. You can also learn more about Super Apps by attending this BlackBerry Developer Webinar.
What apps do you think currently deserve the title “Super App”?
