You may recall our report last year about MobiHand allegedly withholding payments to developers who sold their apps via the MobiHand portal? Turns out it was true and one developer who was owed over $140,000 took MobiHand to court.Since their business model was rapidly dying, it seems MobiHand has decided to finally end its app distribution service (so glad they had the testicular fortitude to let us know in advance). The company offered this statement on their site:What a fabulous ride we had!From San Francisco to Indonesia, from Brazil to Moscow, for eight years we served millions of worldwide customers with their app needs and delivered hundreds of millions of downloads. We enjoyed the rise of many different platforms. BlackBerry and then Android were the biggest. And we suffered through the fall of others. Goodbye Palm and maybe BlackBerry? Remember when we downloaded apps onto a PC and then sideloaded them through a cable to our phones? Today, our apps are discovered, downloaded and updated with very little effort right onto our devices (phones and tablets that we could not have imagined when we started). We are proud to have pioneered many of the innovations that all mobile users enjoy today. We lived through all of these changes, including the entry of some very large companies into the app industry. These companies changed the industry with their massive resources and easy access to existing customers (which some of them vigorously protect by closing their app systems). Domination of mobile app distribution by a relatively small number of large companies has made participation increasingly difficult for independent app distributors. While it was very hard to reach this decision, we have concluded that we have to discontinue our current services. We can only hope that the assets we built over the years will find a new purpose. Thank you for the opportunity to serve you over all these years. The MobiHand Team P.S. Customer accounts will be accessible for a few more days. Customers will be able to re-download purchased apps or get their activation codes, but no upgrades, new codes, or swaps will be available.If you had previously purchased BlackBerry apps on N4BB or another MobiHand portal, you MUST re-download them immediately. Otherwise, it might be too late and it’s highly unlikely the developers of the apps will honor anything that has to do with MobiHand.
Friday, September 7, 2012
If You Bought BlackBerry Apps from MobiHand: Re-Download Them Now!! (September,2012)