Alec Saunders was hired by Research in Motion Ltd. in August with a daunting mandate: make the BlackBerry as cool for apps designers as the iPhone.

For more than a year now, RIM has been ramping up efforts to woo top developers in order to make more apps -- the games and other mobile tools that have revolutionized the smartphone market -- available on its BlackBerry.

Stung by slipping market share in the U.S., the company is now going into overdrive. Saunders, RIM's new vice president for developer relations, said the company has boosted his group's budget, and is bulking up its developer-relations staff in places such as Silicon Valley and New York. He made his first hire in California last week.

He is also prowling for staff in developing markets, such as India and Indonesia, where the BlackBerry is still enjoying a big and growing market. The new hiring is a big step for a company that has long relied on an ecosystem of small developers that have grown up around RIM's headquarters in Waterloo, Ontario.

Last week, RIM unveiled its new operating system, BBX. It is based on QNX, a powerful operating system the company acquired last year. QNX already powers RIM's PlayBook tabletcomputer, and BBX will soon run RIM's next-generation BlackBerry, due out next year. Crucially for RIM's apps push, BBX will allow users to run Android apps on RIM devices, boosting the company's relatively paltry apps library.

Google Inc.'s Android is now the most widely-used smartphone operating system in North America. It boasts more than 250,000 apps. Apple Inc.'s iOS has more than 400,000. By comparison, RIM says it has more than 46,000 apps.

Apps developers have long complained that RIM hasn't made it easy for them, which is part of the reason RIM has lagged behind.

But with iOS and Android dominating the market, RIM's BBX remains a hard sell. RIM'S network outage earlier this month also capped a series of stumbles this year -- including delayed product launches and poor PlayBook sales -- that have clouded the company's future. And it doesn't help that there is still no timeline for the rollout of the new BBX-powered BlackBerrys.

RIM's share of the key U.S. smartphone market had fallen to 11.6% as of the end of June, according to research firm IDC. That put RIM's BlackBerry in third place behind phones powered by Google's Android system and the Apple iPhone. Five years ago, RIM had 48% of the U.S. market.