Which BlackBerry OS to target for enterprise web applications?

Question

I am deciding between which library to use for development: jQuery Mobile or Sencha Touch. The application I am building will specifically target enterprise (Fortune 500) BlackBerries. The application will not require any hardware features, but the user experience/UI rendering should be as good as possible.

I am not familiar with BlackBerry OS adoption/upgrade statistics so I don't know what platform is my lowest common denominator. Are most enterprise users on BlackBerry 6+ or 5+ or 4+? I just don't know and I don't know where to find those statistics. What is your recommendation?

Answer 1

As best practice, I would jump into learning and developing for the latest Operating System, which would be 6. I know all of our customers are working on Bolds a Torches, which means they'd be using 6.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry#Operating_system

Additionally, I would look into creating Adobe AIR applications. They work for Application 6 and Playbooks as well.

http://us.blackberry.com/developers/started/bbdevapproach.jsp

Answer 2

You will likely found RIM's own "Choosing a target OS" page helpful. It has stats on current active devices as well as narrowing down to those devices that use the AppWorld.

Answer 3

In my opinion the first step should be studying the audience of your future application. What model do they use, do they use the most recent models, or they tend to keep working with old models.

The main point is that RIM stops releasing device software for old BlackBerry models. For instance for BlackBerry 8800 the most recent available device OS version is 4.5 But your customer may have a lot of empolyees who use this device.

Devices with device OS version 4+, but before 5.0, do not work properly with complex html/javascript pages.

In version 5.0 there was implemented better support for complex html/javascript functionality in your applications.

Conclusion: If your potential customers are not using old devices, then start supporting device OS versions 5+, otherwise use SDK version 4.x according to the target devices.