The application store rush is definitely on since the success of the iPhone Application Store. News that Blackberry was planning a similar feature of some kind has been circulating for a while now, but few details were available. Applications have been featured on blackberry.com and some other sites, but on nowhere near the scale of what iPhone users have access to through a single portal.

To get a feel for how the stage has been set for Blackberry App World to date, we took a look at some traffic and search data on compete.com.  As it turns out, the site is already drawing comparatively large traffic volumes, and is a top destination for people searching for ‘Blackberry applications’.

Blackberry.com has become an increasingly popular site in the last 12 months, with traffic growing more than 140% and visits per person increasing by 16% year over year.

Compared to most wireless phone  manufacturer sites, this level of traffic is strong: many of Blackberry’s competitors get  fewer than a million each month. 

There are actually some dedicated App World pages on the site today, even though it hasn’t been officially launched yet, that includes information about what it is and developing applications on the site.

The prospects for App World also look pretty good because the manufacturer’s site already seems to be the destination of choice for many people searching the web for apps. Looking at search data on where people who typed “Blackberry application” into one of the major search engines, it turns out that about a fifth of them are already heading to Blackberry.com.


Considering the number of people who are already going to Blackberry.com and their propensity to go to the site while in search of applications already, it’s likely that traffic to App World will increase in the coming months. In the meantime Blackberry users will continue to search  far and wide on the web for new Blackberry applications.