RIM Chief Says Apple Has Mobile App Backward

“There’s an app for that,” Apple tells us. But does there really need to be? Research In Motion co-CEO Jim Balsillie doesn’t think so.

“You don’t need an app for the Web,” he said at the Web 2.0 Summit this week. “I don’t need a YouTube app to go to YouTube. There’s this view that Web sites need to be repurposed for mobile and you need a special set of tools to do it. We don’t believe that to be true.”

An interesting point of view, though one obviously informed by the vast dispartity between RIM’s BlackBerry ecosystem, which tops out at about 10,000 apps and Apple’s iOS ecosystem which boasts over 300,000. And then, of course, there was Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s jab at RIM during the company’s last earnings call. “We’ve now passed RIM,” he said after talking up Apple’s sales of 14.1 million iPhones for the quarter. “I don’t see them catching up with us in the foreseeable future. It will be a challenge for them to create a mobile software platform and convince developers to support a third platform.”

Perhaps in the mobile market dystopia Jobs believes he’s built around RIM, but not in Balsillieville where apps are an overblown fad.