Developers are apparently fleeing BlackBerry

Things never seem to look up for Research In Motion these days. So perhaps it's no surprise that a new report from All Things D's John Paczkowski has found that RIM is "bleeding developers."

Citing a recent survey of 200 developers (from a sample set of 4,300) by Baird Equity Research, Paczkowski wrote that developer interest in working on BlackBerry OS versions 7 and 10 are at a n all time low.

Baird researchers polled developer sentiment towards all major mobile platforms based on a 10-point scale with 10 marked as "excellent" and everything below that trailing down to "poor."

From the first to second quarters of 2012, interest in BlackBerry 10 slipped to 3.8 from 4.6 while positive sentiment towards BlackBerry 7 dropped a whole point to 2.8 from 3.8.

By comparison, iOS -- the leader of the bunch -- jumped from approximately 9.0 to 9.3. Android came in second during the same time frame, although it dropped ever-so-slightly to 8.7.

Windows Phone 8 and 7 were the only other two mobile platforms that placed ahead of BlackBerry, which was trailed by webOS, Flash/AIR, and Bada, respectively.

Unfortunately for RIM, losing developers might just be the final nail in the coffin. The only chance the beleaguered mobile manufacturer has of saving itself at this point is producing something completely outside of the box at this point to get customers and investors excited again. Without developer interest in the BlackBerry platform, there's no chance of that happening.

Nevertheless, Baird researchers were quoted as saying that "many developers who planned to jump ship have already made the move, leaving a BlackBerry developer base that is smaller but increasingly loyal."

UPDATE: RIM reps have pinged us with the following response:

In the past year our app vendor base has grown 157 per cent, we have developers submitting amazing apps to PlayBook, with the PlayBook app catalog growing by more than 15,000 apps in the last year. We just announced that more than three billion applications have been downloaded from BlackBerry App World. More importantly, the BlackBerry 10 Jam World Tour we are currently hosting in 23 cities across the globe has seen over capacity registration in almost every city, including New York, Santa Clara, Toronto and Montreal. We have already spoken to almost 5,000 developers and the feedback has been phenomenal (don't take my word for it, search #bb10jam).

Alec Saunders, vice president of developer relations and ecosystems at RIM, further addressed the issue in a blog post on Friday.

This item first appeared on ZDNet's Between the Lines blog under the headline "Developer interest in BlackBerry OS at all time low."