A Croatian startup named ShoutEm that provides a platform for iOS and Android app creation created a timeline infographic of the history of the mobile app store. Starting in 2008 with the advent of Apple's App Store, the game has fundamentally changed. Check it out below.

The Android Market launched a couple months later in October and had 50 apps to start.

Research In Motion was not far behind, announcing BlackBerry App World at its developers' conference in October 2008 and accepting submissions from developers in early 2009. Nokia's Ovi Store opened in 2009, starting its short-lived run as the No. 2 global app store behind Apple's trailblazer.

The Windows Phone Marketplace launched in late October 2010. By July 2011 it had nearly 30,000 apps. As of Jan. 2012, it has almost 50,000. The BlackBerry App World had about 37,000 at the end of July 2011.

Apple reached the 100,000 app mark first, a little more than a year after launch, in November 2009. Skipping ahead, the Android Market hit 200,000 in early 2011 and nearly doubled its developer output through the remainder of the year. As of now, the Market has about 400,000 apps available while iOS has nearly 550,000.

Check out the timeline below. It ends in Aug. 2011 but we know the history since. The Ovi Store is in decline as Nokia gradually phases out the Symbian series, BlackBerry is in flux and awaiting new devices and trying to spur developers in to creating apps for the platform again while iOS and Android maintain exponential growth.

See the timeline on ShoutEm's blog here.

On the other hand, there is Heins. Here is what he said in his introductory video upon taking up his new role this morning.

• "I don't think there is some drastic change needed. We are evolving, but this is not a seismic change."
• "We are a great innovative company, but sometimes we innovate too much while we're building a product."
• "What we need to get a bit better at here is to have a little bit more of an ear toward the consumer. I want to strengthen this by bringing really good marketing expertise in."

Wait, wait ... stop me if you heard this before. "RIM is fine. We are innovating all the time. All we need is good marketing." Most of these statements were made in the video released by RIM last night introducing Heins.

What company releases a pre-scripted video of their new CEO? I am sure it happens from time to time but it seems like RIM wanted to control the message before it hit the streets this morning.

I will lay even money that Balsillie and Lazaridis teamed up with RIM's media relations department to put out that video, knowing full well what their new puppet was going to say. It would not surprise me if they were standing behind the camera, nodding along as Heins hit the bullet points.

Ever seen The Hudsucker Proxy? If you have not, go stream it on Netflix. The basic premise is that a clueless kid from the mailroom gets promoted to be the president of a large company so the board can ruin the stock and buy it all up themselves. Tim Robbins plays Norville Barnes, the "proxy," a clueless guy out of business school in backwater Muncie, Indiana. Barnes is the patsy to the board, the guy taking the fall.

While Heins is not some foolish backwater kid out of the mailroom (he is an accomplished engineer who has been with RIM for four years and was the COO before his promotion), but the same principle exists. Balsillie and Lazaridis are still likely to be pulling the strings. There are distinct differences like the fact that Balsillie and Lazaridis already own most of RIM's stock and the stock is lower than ever.

At Hudsucker, Barnes surprises the board. He comes out with a new product (the Hula Hoop) that is immensely popular and profitable. Does Heins have a Hula Hoop in him? He better hope so. Otherwise, he is going to get more than his fair share of blame for the eventual collapse of RIM. Balsillie and Lazaridis can point to Heins and say to the board, "you wanted us out but look what happened when we handed the company to this guy."

You have to feel sorry for Heins. His job is not going to be easy. It is going to take more than marketing, more than "flawless execution." He is right in the video, BlackBerry 10 absolutely needs to ship on time. Whenever that time is supposed to be, we do not know.

RIM is not in danger of bankruptcy ... yet. The company probably has several years before it burns through its profitable operating margins and reserved piles of cash. Heins has a chance. Part of that will be thinking outside the box. The big question will if Balsillie and Lazaridis will let him.

As we close down 2011, we can reflect on (and learn from) the numerous, high-profile outages that occurred: Bank of America in March; Amazon EC2, Verizon LTE and Yahoo! Mail and Microsoft in April; and then Apple and Microsoft in August. In analyzing these disasters, I've come up with four lessons to be learned - they'll help protect your company's reputation, technical integrity and customer satisfaction during technical crises.

Lesson #1: Your company's brand is on the line

IT systems are not just internal systems anymore. Most companies experienced their first painful lessons with the advent of web sites and ecommerce. But today, it seems that every company has a growing amount of exposure to potential service outages that result in many unhappy customers. This said, it's critical that IT and line of business executives continue to get more aligned.

We must also realize that systems have a tendency to crash at inopportune times. Look at the Verizon LTE network outage in April. The company's fastest network, the LTE network was unavailable for customers and LTE devices were unable to be activated. The crash happened just 24 hours before the latest 4G-LTE smartphone, the Samsung Droid Charge, was scheduled to launch. The outage delayed the launch by two weeks and no doubt had a significant impact on its sales and reputation.

Lesson #2: Be proactive

Given the potential losses of network service outages, one might think that IT execs are totally focused on preventing major outages. But in my experience, they're not. The key issue that "prevents preventing" outages is the infrastructure and application monitoring systems in use today. Many were architected when a company's IT environment could still be visualized on a couple of PowerPoint slides. Their designs were based on the idea that IT experts would define the performance thresholds, rules and exceptions necessary to identify unacceptable behavior. But today, the typical enterprise application infrastructure is so complex that it defies an IT organization's ability to fully understand. The result, unforeseen outages that often take days to resolve.

These monitoring systems are still great for generating the data required to understand the systems behavior - just ask the operations center that receives tens of thousand of alerts a day. But the real challenge lies in making sense of the alerts, and taking the right action to resolve the inevitable issues quickly.

Lesson #3: When crisis strikes, communicate early and often

Face it - we live in a 24/7 world and your customers know when there is a problem. It's best not to ignore it and hope they don't notice.

When the Microsoft cloud crashed in September, they kept customers in the loop, promising updates at precise time increments. The official Windows Live Status site read, "We're aware of a problem with Hotmail that's affecting some people. We're investigating and will provide an update by Sept. 9 11:30 p.m..."

RIM failed twice over - responding several hours into the crisis and providing little details to ease customer angst. "We understand the frustrations our customers are experiencing through the delays with the messaging an browsing...I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize unreservedly to all those people affected by this situation. We're taking this situation extremely seriously and we're doing everything we can to restore normal operation to our service, " said CTO David Yach.

Lesson #4: Make amends

RIM eventually offered users $100 in premium applications and in some cases, free technical support for a month. While the costs to support the offers are likely high, it is likely worth it... It's also important to remember that if you don't provide compensation for customer inconvenience, your competitor's will. The day that Yahoo! Mail crashed in Aprill 2011, Microsoft wasted no time offering annoyed customers something to make them feel better. The official Hotmail account tweeted, "First 1k #ymail users to testdrivethenew@hotmail.com and send feedback today get HM+ free for 1yr. SwitchToHotmail.com."

Don't let your competitors be your customer's solution to your outage crisis.

With major companies like RIM, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Bank of America, and many others all experiencing major network outages this past year, it's time to realize that it isn't a matter of if your IT department will someday face a crisis, but rather when your IT department will face a network crisis. Be prepared and have a plan for how your company will react and respond from both a technical and public relations perspective to minimize the aftermath.

As we look forward into 2012, we wish you smooth running networks and fast resolutions to the challenges coming your way.

At least one of our writers believes Blackberry may be paralleling a much loved, but dead, video game company. But what about you? Will you give Blackberry another try, now that you've seen BBX?

We asked you earlier today and we culled your responses from Facebook, Google Plus, the original post and Twitter and we used Storify to present it all back to you. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.

New support has been added for 22 new languages on Android, and 12 new languages on iOS. Facebook Messenger is already available on iPhone (including iOS5) and Android, and now it's available on BlackBerry. Beluga, the system behind Facebook Messenger, was supposed to be the BlackBerry Messenger for non-BlackBerries. In an ironic twist of fate, that system has made its way to BlackBerry through Facebook.

Now that this app has come to BlackBerry, will BlackBerry users start leaving BlackBerry Messenger for Facebook Messenger?

As with Facebook Messenger for iPhone and Android, the BlackBerry version brings in all of your Facebook conversations, making it easy to access everything from one place. The app stands alone. BlackBerry Messenger offers messaging with other BlackBerry Messenger-confirmed users only.

The announcement about Facebook Messenger came from Facebook engineer Lucy Zhang, ex-Googler and co-founder of the group messaging startup Beluga, which was acquired by Facebook in March, right before SXSW. As it expands, Facebook Messenger continues to build off Beluga's design - and this isn't the first time Beluga has been compared to BlackBerry Messenger.

Calling all BlackBerry users! Do you have BlackBerry Messenger? If so, would you be willing to switch to Facebook Messenger?

The fact of the matter is that RIM needs to find a way to pull itself off the mat. Without question, 2011 has been the worst year in the company's history. Its new devices and development cycle has slowed, the PlayBook tablet was a dud in terms of sales and the cycles of its developer platforms have slowed to a crawl. The executive ranks at RIM have also been in turmoil. If the night is darkest before the dawn, will RIM survive to see another day?

Traffic In UAE & Free Apps

"Our global network supports the communications needs of more than 70 million customers," said RIM Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis. "We truly appreciate and value our relationship with our customers. We've worked hard to earn their trust over the past 12 years, and we're committed to providing the high standard of reliability they expect, today and in the future."

The first story emerged last night - Abu Dhabi and Dubai police said that there was a 20% decrease in traffic accidents because of the three-day service outage. This story screams of spin, coming from a country that has had diplomatic problems with RIM in the past. The second story crashed every mobile tech reporters' inbox this morning: RIM is giving away $100 worth of applications to those affected by the outage.

The story coming out of the United Arab Emirates is suspect. Without knowing the country's week-to-week traffic data, it is hard to put it in context. The story notes that traffic accidents among young males went down after the outage. The CTIA wireless organization has made driving while texting one of its two biggest priorities this year but it would be astonishing if one out of every five crashes in Dubai were BlackBerry Messenger or mobile email related. Either way, it is another blow to RIM in its negative press cycle.

The concession from RIM to give away applications is also the work of a PR spin machine. More or less, this is the type of thing that should be expected from a large company when it makes a serious gaffe. The selection of apps (which, ironically, includes DriveSafe.ly Pro and Enterprise) will be available from Wednesday Oct. 19 to the end of the year.

QNX & The Future Of RIM

The PlayBook has not sold to RIM's expectations. Earlier this year the company was touting the fact that anybody who owned a BlackBerry (at the time about 55 million worldwide) would love one of RIM's tablets. Sales have not been equally as upbeat and the PlayBook (like any other non-iPad tablet) has seen a dramatic price reduction.

RIM is hampered by its slow development cycle when it comes to QNX. Standard native applications like email and calendar were not present when the tablet first rolled out and the ability to run Android apps through its "app player" is still not ready for public consumption. If RIM released a fully functional BlackBerry tablet with the ability to run Android apps, that would have been a tablet many would have bought.

The first QNX-based smartphones are coming out next year, supposedly early in the year with the first prototypes likely to be seen at the Consumer Electronics Show (it would be a big red flag if they were not). RIM cannot allow the problems it faced with the PlayBook to hamper its new line of smartphones. Doing so will put the company on a death spiral from which it will not soon recover. The current BlackBerry OS 7 devices are lame ducks in the development cycle, although they should hang around in the enterprise for some time as hardware replacement cycles are slower than in the consumer realm.

No Imminent Demise, But Signs Are Troubling

Add everything up - squabbling execs, QNX woes, sales drops, loss of consumer mind share and the recent technical problems and the signs are there for the death of BlackBerry. Not so fast. RIM is still a huge company and it controls 19% of the U.S. smartphone market. We wrote in July three reasons why RIM should not be counted out. The same principles still apply. That market share has gone down from 24% earlier this year, mostly due to Android. Yet, RIM still has a significant war chest. It may not have the kind of money that Apple does, but multi-billion dollar international companies do not go away overnight. Not even Nokia. RIM can hold on for a long while without being swallowed by Microsoft or liquidating its consumer mobile business. The key will be how the company spreads it resources. Its smartphone mobile browser needs to get better and new devices that look more like what consumers expect from a modern smartphone need to emerge from QNX. RIM has the resources to do this.

2011 has been a bad year for RIM, yes. It also could be seen as a bridge year. The year it suffered through a development slump as it jumped to a new OS. The year it endured turmoil in its aging infrastructure, both in the physical world and its executive ranks. The fork is in front of Research In Motion. One way leads to a Nokia-sized collapse. The other leads to future prosperity and reclaiming a competitive roll against Android and iOS.

The question becomes: does RIM have what it takes to pull itself away from the brink? The road is clear if it can take the first step down the path.

This, my friends, is such a time.

If you know a BlackBerry user, reach out to them. (Not with email. That's just mean.) Let them know you care, and that just because they were offline for a few days, you still love and respect them.

See more Noise to Signal cartoons here.

Bloomberg reports that Siemens AG and its joint venture, Nokia Siemens Networks, has made it possible for Bahraini secret police to intercept and generate transcripts of text messages and other mobile communications made by protesters in that country's troubled version of the Arab Spring.

South Africa plans Blackberry eavesdropping. The South African government is talking about giving police access to Blackberry's encrypted messaging (BBM). AFP reported that Deputy Communications Minister Obed Bapela called the BBM a security risk, quoting the Sapa News Agency: "There is evidence that criminals are now using BBM to plan and execute crime. We want to review BBM like in the UK and Saudi Arabia."

UK PM's plan to ban social media dropped. Prime Minister David Cameron's knuckleheaded attempt to place the onus for last month's riots on social media has died the death it deserved. Our contention that the leadership of Cameron's government was walleyed about social media was something they wound up admitting.

WikiLeaks may be petering out. Peter Dorling, of the Sydney Morning Herald, who has followed the news surrounding Wikileaks and its Australian founder from the beginning, has published a fascinating, fair-minded story that theorizes an end to Wikileaks.

After accidentally allowing the publication of their remaining diplomatic cables - which, along with the publication of the password to those cables in a book by two Guardian reporters made them public - Dorling believes there is not much left for WikiLeaks to do. Their leak-submission function has not in fact functioned for a year and there does not seem to be another Bradley Manning hidden in the wings.

Fight over Libya's Internet. Six months after going dark, Libya's Internet connection to the world came back on briefly during the rebel surge that resulted in their control of most of the country. It's largely dark again and it may take a definitive end to hostilities before it is up to stay.

China tightens restrictions on microblogging, citizens react. "Chinese netizens are in an uproar," NTD reported. "Recent indications from the Chinese regime seem to point to tougher controls on popular mircroblogging services, such as Sina Weibo." State-run Xinhua News Agency, which acts as a mouthpiece for the rulers, criticized the site for its role in spreading what it calls false information. The "toxic rumors" Xinhua attacked included a train crash in Wenzhou. The outraged citizen response on microblogging sites, including Sina Weibo, forced corrupt and lazy authorities to act.

Uzbekistan creates a national Internet. The Central Asian tyranny has created its own version of a "halal Internet." Muloqot is intended "for the formation of high morals." In reality, it is about control of access to information and the means to disseminate argument and to cancel out the effects of social networks like Odnoklassniki and Facebook, where dissidents gather.

Kazakhastan bans Livejournal. After ordering all Kazakhstani websites use the .kz domain to be hosted on local servers, where they can be controlled by the government, the country's authorities have begun banning sites. The latest is early blog platform Livejournal. The excuse given was that the social network's "promote(s) terriorism and religious extremism and (contained) calls to acts of terrorism and the manufacture of explosive devices."

Egyptian blogger moved to prison hospital. Blogger and critic of the military, Maikel Nabil was the first Egyptian to be arrested by the military in post-Mubarak Egypt.

He declared a hunger strike to protest the injustice of his military trial and imprisonment and the continued meddling by the Egyptian armed forces into civilian life. Now, he has grown sick enough that he has been relocated to the prison's infirmary. He sickened "two days after he stopped drinking liquids on the eighth day of his hunger strike."

As its name would suggest, the service works over Blackberry's proprietary messaging platform, which can be used to share songs and playlists amongst other BBM Music subscribers. A subscription will cost $5 per month and include access to 50 songs at any given time. Twenty-five of those songs can be swapped out per month and users can gain access to more music via friends who opt to share it with them. Thus, the more socially connected you are via BBM Music, the more music you can listen to.

Like Spotify and Rdio, BBM Music lets users sync songs locally for offline listening. If they want to actually own the tracks, they have the option to purchase them as MP3's through Amazon.

As far as streaming music apps go, Blackberry users already have a handful to choose from, including Pandora, Last.fm and Rdio. Spotify, which just launched in the U.S. last month, is said to be working on their own app for the platform.

BBM Music is available as a closed beta to BBM 6 users in the United States, Canada and United Kingdom.

"Social media and other methods have been used to organise these levels of greed and criminality ... That investigation is already under way and that is exactly the sort of thing we are looking at."

More to the point, and less dramatically, photo-sharing and video sites, as well as text tweets and social networks, may serve as evidence for police to identify, apprehend and charge - and for prosecutors to secure verdicts against - looters and those involved in smashing windows and starting fires.

Blackberry

In other social media-meets-London riot news, attention has been focused on Blackberry's private messaging service, known as BBM. London tech and media specialist Jonathan Akwue wrote a post on his blog outlining the case for Blackberry as the messaging vector of choice for the rioters.

"BBM as it is known, is an instant messenger system that has become popular for three main reasons: it's fast (naturally), it's virtually free, and unlike Twitter or Facebook, it's private... I don't know the extent to which the police are able to monitor the BBM network, but Canadian police officers have previously complained that criminals prefer using Blackberry Messenger because it is harder to wiretap."

Although many of the messages seem organizational in nature, many also seem criminal, with exhortations to rob and information on areas unprotected by the police.

In a subsequent post, Akwue said that "BBM is the social network of choice" for "the urban young people I'm connected to." One user told him, "BBM is standard issue... Of course. It's all about BBM. This is our network!"

I agree with Akwue that, just as Egypt's was not a Facebook revolution, this too, for better or worse, was a story of people acting on their environment, not of technology acting on people.

Riot police photo by Steve Jackson, video by Alan Stanton | other sources: New York Times | thanks to Deane Rimmerman

However, Apple is the top manufacturer of smartphones. This claim is mainly due to the fact that Apple ships its own phones, while Android is spread out across a number of OEM's, including leading manufacturers like HTC, Motorola and Samsung.

We thought this "Android is #1" headline sounded vaguely familiar, and it is. In March, Nielsen reported the same thing. So the news today is not so much about Android moving into the number one spot, as it is an update on where things stand now. Yep, Android's still there at #1. And it has even a bigger market share than before.

To compare, in March, Nielsen reported that Android had 29% consumer market share in the U.S., while Apple's iOS and RIM's BlackBerry OS were a close second at 27% each. Today, those numbers are 39%, 28% and 20%, respectively. In other words, both Android and Apple are gaining here at RIM's expense.

It's also interesting to see how the smartphone manufacturers have benefited from the Android surge. HTC's Android market share is up from 12% in March to 14% in June. Motorola  went from 10% to 11%, and Samsung went from 5% to 8%.

Of course, these manufacturers put out other phones besides Android phones, and those trends are pictured here, too. Wow, does that show HTC's Windows Mobile/Phone marketshare dropping a percentage point from March to June? And webOS dropped, too?

March 2011

June 2011

RIM, having become aware of the leak yesterday, warned users to "refrain from downloading and installing this software since it is outdated and non-functional in many respects." RIM's right, of course - the software is broken and buggy. But refrain from installing? That's no fun! Especially since some folks have already figured out how to get Android apps up and running on the PlayBook, including email.

Installing the current version of the Android App Player on your PlayBook (assuming you are one of the few that actually owns one) could "seriously mess things up," says the RIM-tracking blog CrackBerry.com. So if you're just curious about what the Player looks like, you can check it through the video the site posted (below) in the video, the player gets stuck for a bit on the loading screen, and then, when loading is complete, only presents a blank screen as the main user interface. However, you can dig around a little in various menus, check out some of the pre-loaded default Android apps (many of which don't work properly), and you can even send and receive email through Android's email client software.

That last one is notable, of course, since PlayBook owners are still waiting on RIM to ship the much-needed core applications, including email, contacts and calendar. Unless you currently own a BlackBerry phone, there's no way (outside webmail) to check your email using the PlayBook. RIM says these apps, as well as the App Player, will arrive sometime this summer.

Android Apps Hacked to Run on PlayBook Using App Player

Some enterprising developers and tech enthusiasts monkeyed around with the software yesterday, and have figured out how to actually run third-party Android applications using the App Player. Screenshots and messages posted to the CrackBerry forums show installations of Zynga's Words with Friends, Amazon's Kindle, Astro and others.

We wouldn't recommend trying this yourself, unless you really know what you're doing, or are willing to suffer the consequences.

Image credit: CrackBerry forum member lawguyman

The words of Seesmic's announcement make the company's rationale clear: the company is discontinuing support for Blackberry "in order to focus development efforts on our most popular mobile platforms: Android, iOS, and WIndows Phone 7."

Of course, this may just be one high-profile departure from that ecosystem, but there seems to be a sense that the RIM ship is sinking. At the same time, some analysts are predicting that Windows Phone 7 may see a large jump in adoption, and so focusing on that platform, along with Android and iOS would make sense.

The recommendations for Seesmic for Blackberry users, according to the company: "We encourage those effected by this change to try out Seesmic for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone 7." In other words, buy a new smartphone. Ouch.

"Fiscal 2012 has gotten off to a challenging start," said Jim Balsillie, RIM's Co-CEO. "The slowdown we saw in the first quarter is continuing into Q2, and delays in new product introductions into the very late part of August is leading to a lower than expected outlook in the second quarter."

During the call, RIM confirmed that it shipped 500,000 units of its new PlayBook and 13.2 million BlackBerries. That last figure might not seem too bad, but here's a figure to offer in comparison: 18.65 million iPhones sold, according to Apple's recent quarterly earnings call.

And note the difference there. BlackBerries shipped. iPhones sold. It seems likely that many of the devices that RIM reported today are still sitting on store shelves.

As RIM didn't meet its projections, the company says it's announcing a "cost optimization program" that will include an undisclosed number of layoffs. It also revised projections downwards for the rest of the year and earnings per share for the full year fiscal 2012 are now expected to be between $5.25 and $6.00. Upon word of the report, RIM stocks fell sharply today.

RIM told BlackBerry-loving blog CrackBerry that the recall is due to a glitch in the OS "that may result in the devices being unable to properly load software upon initial set-up." It affects 16GB models that were shipped to Staples and most have not reached consumers and are still in distribution. Does RIM have a brewing PlayBook problem on its hands?

There are reasons it took RIM almost seven months between announcement and launch of the PlayBook. Apps have been a problem, both native and the proposed Android app player. RIM may have been a touch ambitious as it tried to leapfrog a generation of software development and provide a wide array of developer tools that will work with the PlayBook. The PlayBook is a sophisticated piece of hardware running a new form of consumer gadget O. (QNX Neutrino ran in stuff like cars and jets before RIM acquired it.) There are necessary growing pains.

Fact of the matter - recalls happen. This one, as long as it is isolated as believed, is not a problem for anyone but RIM and Staples and only a minor inconvenience at that.

If you are a PlayBook owner, Endgadget published the serials numbers of all the devices in the recall.