RIM frustrates BlackBerry developers with frequent outages

RIM has belatedly apologised to developers after the BlackBerry developer platform suffered a two-day service outage last week.

The company admitted to stability issues with four code-signing services, meaning that some developers were not able to sign-in to their applications.

Tyler Lessard, vice president of developer relations and alliances at RIM, apologised for the disruption, insisting that the issue had been treated as a priority.

"The signing servers are now operating normally and developers can continue with code signing. We are continuing to monitor the service closely and are actively evaluating new solutions that we can implement to improve the reliability of the service overall," he said on the BlackBerry Developer Blog.

However, the blog post has done little to appease frustrated BlackBerry developers. One developer, Simon Hain, summed up the frustration with his comments on Lessard's blog post.

"[As] long as the signing process is there, your company should be a lot better in communicating outages. A bit of marketing bull does not return the trust of customers who had to wait two more days for their release," he said.

"Why is there no official status server? Why is there no Twitter for it? Why are no estimated repair times posted? If you want to keep the signing servers as a critical component of development you should establish backup systems and a much better communication for them."

Since the initial disruption on 11 July, the BlackBerry Developer Forum has been flooded with messages from angry developers, many of whom consider it an all too frequent occurrence.

"Is it so difficult to send a notice via email to the developer community that the code signing servers are offline? Is it so hard to have a redundancy plan in place to prevent this from happening again?" asked 'ak155'.

"You've cost our team at least one day of testing and I'm sure that this has impacted other groups more severely. If you insist that we sign our apps with your servers, you need to be more serious about maintaining zero down time with your service."

RIM needs the help of the developer community more than ever as the company tries to build its QNX-based ecosystem for the BlackBerry PlayBook.

But with competitors such as HTC making an aggressive push to attract developers, RIM could find itself unpopular if these problems continue.