Alec Saunders, RIM's VP for Developer Relations, used the BlackBerry DevCon Europe stage today to "bust a few myths" about the state of the BlackBerry app ecosystem. Firstly, he took issue with the suggestion that BlackBerry users aren't using apps, telling us that there are now over six million daily downloads from the BB App World, totalling 174m per month, for an overall tally of over two billion. On a per-human basis, that's 30 app downloads per BlackBerry user per year. The second point Saunders disagreed with was the idea that BlackBerry app development isn't profitable, citing data that suggest the App World generates 43 percent more daily downloads per app than Apple's App Store and has more paid downloads than Google's Android Market.

Overall, the App World generates 40 percent more revenue for developers, we're told, than the Android Market, with the result being that RIM's app platform is the second most profitable behind iOS. 13 percent of BlackBerry developers have made over $100,000 from their involvement with App World. Those sound like undeniably robust data points, though we're not quite ready to consider RIM's developer proposition quite as rosy as Saunders would have us believe. Maybe if BlackBerry 10 and its feted first smartphone were to arrive in the first half of this year, we might be inclined to think differently.