In September 2009, Starbucks introduced its Starbucks Card Mobile app for iPhone and iPod touch, enabling the owners of those devices to reload their Starbucks payment cards, monitor their rewards cards and even pay for their purchases at 16 stores in Seattle and the Silicon Valley region. In June, the coffee company extended its mobile payment system to 1,000 Target stores in addition to the roster of Starbucks venues.
Now all of this functionality has been adapted -- and, in some respects, improved -- for BlackBerry Bold, Curve, Storm and Tour users. For instance, BlackBerry owners can use the app's store locator to identify all Starbucks and Target venues where Starbucks is sold, not just the ones that support mobile payments.
In an interview with Mashable, Chuck Davidson, the category manager for innovation on the Starbucks Card team, described the group's painstaking efforts to optimize the app experience for BlackBerry users. "We didn't just want to put an iPhone app on a BlackBerry, which would have shocked BlackBerry users," Davidson explained. "We had to get inside a BlackBerry head and use the right workflow."
Thus, instead of embedding rich graphics and video for navigation, the team utilized the menu key, resulting in a much more intuitive experience for BlackBerry users.
With the addition of BlackBerry support, Davidson said that roughly three-fourths of its customers now have access to the Starbucks Card Mobile app. While he didn't confirm that an Android app was in the works, he did say it was the third-most requested app after the iPhone and BlackBerry.