Carrier Billing Headed To BlackBerry Apps World

When it comes to selling applications to mobile device owners, the easier the better. That's why support for carrier billing is so important. According to Research In Motion co-CEO Jim Balsillie, BlackBerry Apps World will add carrier billing support in 2010.This week in San Francisco, RIM is hosting its second, annual DEVCON event. If you can't guess from the acronym, the conference is for BlackBerry developers. One of the pieces of information that came to light was a little statement made by co-CEO Jim Balsillie during his address to the throng of developers.

Carrier billing is coming to the BlackBerry Apps World in 2010. That should be a welcome relief to the ears of both BlackBerry owners and developers. Unfortunately, Balsillie was short on details.

As it stands, anyone wishing to purchase an application from BlackBerry Apps World (ones that requires a fee) needs to use PayPal to make the payment. This is not the easiest payment system ever devised. In fact, it is believed to actually deter users from making purchases.

Carrier billing will allow customers to make purchases and have the fee added to their monthly cellular phone bill. This is already how it works for a wide range of services that are offered by the network operators, such as ringtone and wallpaper downloads. Users are familiar with this purchasing model and fairly comfortable with it.

Gaining billing support from all the North American carriers simultaneously should be a key goal for RIM as it moves forward with development of Apps World. It would be quite frustrating to millions of users if one carrier supports billing and others don't. Hopefully RIM can get this right from the get go.

[via Wireless Week]