My Plea To BlackBerry Developers And RIM Regarding Paid App Registration Codes

One thing that has always bothered me about the BlackBerry platform is how it handles registration of paid applications. As it stands now, when you purchase and download an application most developers require your PIN, then issue you a registration code which allows your paid application to work. The problem that exists with this structure is easily noticed when you partake in frequent OS upgrades. Any BlackBerry user who uses a lot of paid apps will tell you, re-registering your applications after a OS install can be a pain in the butt. Ever since the last 9700 OS leak, my apps have remained unregistered simply based on the hassle I have to go through inputting the registration codes.

Some developers have gone and created work arounds which automatically register your apps through the internet upon reloading an OS. This is a great practice. However, not all developers have taken on this task. Pretty much every other platform has a way of automatically registering paid applications when device changes occur. Heck, even jailbroken iPhones keep track of your paid applications. Yet, Research In Motion have yet to consider this an issue or offer some method of doing so. Aside from BlackBerry App World, you are stuck re-entering registration codes for applications and we all certainly do not use BlackBerry App World.

Sure, you could create an excel sheet. Sure, you could copy and paste them all into memopad but why should you have to? Walk with me here and think about this. An onboard database that is made available to developers through an API which allows them to write registration code data that remains untouched after an OS upgrade. Then upon reboot your applications automatically re-register themselves. Wouldn't that be great? So I leave this semi rant here to collect your thoughts on the matter and as a plea to RIM and developers to come up with an alternative method to manually inputting long registration codes. Also, if you are a developer and have reasons as to why this is NOT a good idea, please share those as well.

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