OTTAWA — After months of misery underlined by the declining market share of its BlackBerry phone in North America, a profoundly unsuccessful move into tablet computers and, just last week, a prolonged failure of its service for millions of users worldwide, Research in Motion has a new opportunity to convince the world that it remains relevant.

Starting Tuesday, the company will hold its annual conference for software developers in San Francisco. Normally, the conference, with sessions like, “Alice.js: A Lightweight Independent CSS Engine,” would grab little attention. But this conference is for the developers RIM must persuade to build the apps for the next generation of BlackBerrys and PlayBook tablets. Without those apps, people are less likely to buy the devices and restore the company’s former glory.

“The meeting is important and it’s going to be really difficult for RIM,” said Kevin Burden, an industry analyst with ABI Research. “It’s going to have to get up there and talk about real timelines. You can’t have half-baked products and half-baked plans.”

Research in Motion, which is led by Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, has an entirely new mobile operating system, and developers hope the company will reveal details at the conference about the next generation of smartphones to be built around it. But the company has said little about those phones and has given developers no specific timeline for their introduction. It has continued to promote its devices’ security and, until last week, technical reliability as the main attractions of the current BlackBerry long after Apple’s iPhone and phones using Google’s Android operating system had made mobile devices into pocket-size computers as well as communications devices.