Why the U2 App Sucked: RIM's Alan Brenner Speaks

For those of us that are big U2 fans, we were slightly disappointed with the U2 mobile album app. Yea, it's free, but it wasn't close to what everyone was expecting. Those looking for it to have been a full album came up empty handed. RIM's senior vice president of blackberry devices, Alan Brenner, believes the U2 app was a success with its intended purpose, at the Billboard Mobile Entertainment Live event he says:

"The most salient feature of that app is that it's based on creating real relationships between the users and the band," "It wasn't just the music, or the access to the photos and lyrics; the app actually connected U2 fans to each other. And I think that's the trend we're going to continue to see with music apps—a push toward using them to connect people in real-time to their friends, not just the content."

This is one reason why RIM recently launched the new SDK developers kit. RIM wants to allow developers to include HTML and CSS into their apps, unlike previous apps that were solely java-based. RIM is hoping that developers can make more music apps (like the U2 mobile album) so users can share playlists and interact, similar to a social networking site.

While we aren't opposed to more and better interactions within the Blackberry apps, we dislike the "cheapened" use of a musical artists fame to push, what we believe, was a beta test for the new SDK dev kit. Nevertheless, U2 fans were mildly sad and RIM was happy. Hopefully, now that developers got their hands on the new SDK dev kit, we'll get more of what users want and future music albums won't suck.