Blackberry: isDeveloperFriendly()

I started in mobile space with the little or no knowledge of mobile application development, as it went on I worked upon the various mobile environments like Brew, palm, J2me, Win Mob, Blackberry and the latest fad is Android.

Each platform I worked upon has their own limitation and advantages and as the development goes on, advantages always outweigh the limitations posed by the platform but..but but..this was my convention and experience till the time I haven't worked upon "THE BLACKBERRIES". As a developer you are always on a high whenever you get a chance to get the hands on a new (for me) and MOST popular technology of the time, same was the case with me, I started off with a new JOSH and enthu and was quietly maintained it for my first two application, but soon I lost the charm for Blackberry and then suddenly I was trying to escape the Blackberry world.

I know you want to know the reasons behind that and I am not going to disappoint you:

1. The IDE provided by the RIM is literally just serving as Editor with the Compilation capability. we belong to the world of IDE's like Eclipse, Net beans, Jbuilder. They get one step ahead of the developer always extending their help for fast development sessions. I can hear some voices, saying something about the Eclipse plugin well ..i must say or rather ask you guys: can you use the standalone eclipse plugin for the whole sole BB development effort? if your answer is No, read on else i must say that you have the patience :) as i cant use it for debugging, deploying etc. its not stream lined yet every now and then it complains even while compiling, though the same compiles perfectly in JDE, I guess both are the products of RIM.
2. The Documentation: The Api doc is fairly simple, but to be frank it is simplest, no effort has been carried out to document properly (comment with the indication what its for and other helpful information) the API, Constants. Most frustrating ones are constants, they are just there for the heck of it, its up to you to take the meaning out of it. Everyone is not like me RIM :-) if you want you can visit the package net.rim.device.api.browser.field.*.
3. The $20 for Build Signing: I dint get the logic for charging a fee for Signatures for on device testing, though its good they have reduced it from $100 to $20 but still its doesn't sound logical on the contrary Android also require a Signature for on device test but you can build your own locally and deploy the build on device after signing. When will RIM understand that they are not doing any favor on a developer rather vice versa is true, this is already proved with the huge success of iPhone (applications have fair amount of share in its success).
4. Deploying on device: on BB deploying on device is fairly complex starting from the desktop manager to Re-deploying, if you are using OTA then manager doesn't matter. Desktop manager in simple terms is not usable for application deployment purposes if you still want to try, try it and don't complain, Secondly the major problem which I see is, if your application is using a persistent store in your application and you want to uninstall it from the device the operation wont complete unless and until you restart the device and in BB terms its a quite lengthy task to do. (this is the one which I hate most).
   

The above ones are the major show stopper in Blackberry development.
I am on for debate :-).