Exclusive: Flowd 'honestly happy' to have abandoned BlackBerry plans

If you'd asked the developers at music social network Flowd if they had plans to make a BlackBerry app at the beginning of this year, they would have said yes. Ask now and the plans are on ice, product of a turbulent year for RIM's platform.

Although Flowd currently has apps for iOS, Android and Nokia (that's the companies Finnish roots showing through), it's yet to release software for BlackBerry or Windows Phone.

We asked Wilhelm Taht, Flowd's director of marketing, if a BlackBerry app is in the pipeline and there was no beating about the bush in his response.

BlackBerry crumble

He told us, "BlackBerry has been on our target list throughout the year but I can honestly say we're happy we haven't gone with it.

"Metrics show BlackBerry users aren't going to be BlackBerry users much longer. So, you know, it's a good thing we didn't do it.

"If things suddenly change for BlackBerry we'd reconsider but we took the position to continue to wait and see in the spring."

Although not entirely surprising, it's interesting to see developers and services abandoning ship as early as spring this year.

Slow product release cycles on RIM's part and the PlayBook's lack of success were already taking their toll, even before the bad press of the London riots, takeover talks, internal staff criticism and the disastrous three-day BlackBerry outage later in the year.

Flowd itself is hardly a household name at the moment with the company yet to set the social networking music lover's world alight. Describing itself as a music social network, the app allows you to share music info with friends, check in to gigs, take advantage of exclusive offers and keep up with news from your favourite artists.

The company celebrated its first birthday last week boasting 900 artists using the application, although it wouldn't reveal active user figures.

Jockeying for position

Windows Phone is also on Flowd's radar, but, like many app developers, the company is waiting to see how 2012 shapes up for the fledgling OS.

"Windows Phone is on the wait and see list. Analysts predict growth for the platform next year, but it isn't big enough yet," Taht told us.

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