As RIM tries to stay afloat until it’s Blackberry 10 devices hits the market, rumors are  circulating that RIM is having trouble with developers.  The last thing RIM needs is developers jumping ship.  They need all the help they can get for their new devices.

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Research in Motion today denied that it is losing developers, and said reports to the contrary “do not gel with what we’re seeing in the real world.”

The issue made headlines after a report from Baird Equity Research claimed that RIM was losing developers and that interest in BlackBerry 10 was waning. In response, Alec Saunders, RIM’s head of developer relations, penned a blog post in which he claimed to be “pretty shocked” by Baird’s findings.

Saunders said RIM’s BlackBerry App World vendor base grew 157 percent in the last year, and pointed to the recent 3 billion download milestone.

More importantly, he said, are the crowds for the current BlackBerry 10 Jam World Tour. RIM “has seen over capacity registration in almost every city, including New York, Santa Clara, Toronto, Jakarta, Singapore, Delhi, and Montreal,” Saunders wrote. “We have already spoken to almost 5,000 developers and the feedback has been phenomenal (don’t take my word for it, search Twitter for the hashtag #bb10jam).”

According to Saunders, developers are “amazed at how easy it is to work with the BlackBerry 10 tools.”

“The other thing I hear consistently is that RIM simply treats developers better than anyone else in the mobile industry,” he wrote. “To all new developers coming on board, we are building something amazing and we know you will be impressed by the open nature of our platform and our commitment to you. Welcome!”

As reported by All Things D, the Baird report found that “dev sentiment toward BlackBerry 10 and BlackBerry 7 in general at a new low.”

On a 10-point scale, interest in BlackBerry 10 dropped from 4.6 to 3.8 between the first and second quarter. Interest in iOS was at 9.3 and Android landed at 8.7, Baird found.

Baird said many developers disillusioned with RIM have already jumped ship, leaving the company with a “smaller but increasingly loyal” developer base, ATD said.

The next big question is when BlackBerry 10 will actually make its debut. Last month, RIM announced that it would delay the rollout of its BlackBerry 10 OS from the fall until the first quarter of 2013. By that time, we’ll likely have another iPhone in the market, as well as a handful of Android Jelly Bean-enhanced Android smartphones. Is BlackBerry 10 spectacular enough to compete?

[pcmag]