Doesn't Anybody Here Know How to Play This Game?

Bad sign: Developers abandoning RIM for iOS and Android. The reasons will shock you — if you haven’t been paying attention. Among them:

“You have to put your resources where the growth is,” Seesmic Chief Executive Officer Loic Le Meur said in an interview. “It’s coming down to the explosive growth of the iPhone and the Android operating systems.”

And:

“As soon as RIM brought in a touchscreen and mixed it with a thumbwheel, a keyboard and shortcut keys, it made it really difficult and expensive to develop across devices,” said Purple Forge CEO Brian Hurley. “What Apple scored big on is having a touch screen and a button and that’s it.”

And:

“In deploying Apple applications, there are very few surprises,” said Hurley. “In Android, there are increasingly more surprises. But in BlackBerry, there are immediately lots of gotchas across the board.”

One developer couldn’t even get his app to load on RIM’s best-forgotten PlayBook.

RIM’s major problem versus iOS and Android has been its incomplete ecosystem. And the problem is getting worse, not better.