By What a sad day for RIM: on the day the world will rejoice at the announcements of Android 4.0, the Nexus Prime, and the Droid RAZR, they are peddling the Blackberry Playbook to developers by bragging about how it can run Android applications through Blackberry Packager for Android.
Sounds like a great idea. While I’m at it, how about I put a DVD into my VHS player and see if it’s compatible with Wii Bowling.
Rather than further dilute the equity of their brand by using partial compatability with other platforms as an enduring strength, perhaps they should invest that time into making their own product better. Maybe they’re just trying to buy time, but the fact that RIM is so happy that the Playbook can run an Android version of “Hello, World!” makes me think Blackberry is fairly close to saying, “Good Bye, World!”
Is Blackberry doomed? Beyond going Android and announcing the Google Nexusberry… can they be saved?
Doomed.. I doubt developers will bother porting over their apps. It’s likely the “good” apps won’t port right anyways. So blackberry will get a ton of Crap android apps which is not going to help their situation. Blackberry does not have the Muscle (i.e. lots of cash) to dump into coming out of this. You want cool get a apple, you want smart get a android, you want to look out of touch get a blackberry.
For a developer, it doesn’t seem much different than developing an app to work on one more model of phone or tablet and submitting it to another app store. For developers that already cater to a wide range of devices and sell their apps in multiple app stores, this is a minor inconvenience for a larger audience. However, it doesn’t much encourage developers to develop native QNX apps and I still think Blackberry would be better off cutting their losses and just switching to Android, but I digress.
I disagree that it is only a minor inconvenience to port an app to a completely different mobile platform. It can actually be a major pain in the ass since the libraries, available functionality, and languages are different. It’s one thing to make an Android app work on one more Android phone; it’s something completely different to make that same app work on an iPhone or a Blackberry.
If it’s an Android app working on a 7″ tablet (like Amazon’s upcoming Kindle Fire”) porting is just the matter of checking so that it is compatible. Which I think is mainly checking that it runs on Android 2.3 although I think there are a few other requirements beyond that. Why wouldn’t an Android developer take a small bit of time to check if their app works on that market and get wider distribution? Here aren’t a huge number of PlayBook’s out there, but Blackberry users are known to be willing to pay for good quality apps.
Wow, coming from Blackberry to an Android, I came looking for a good forum to find apps, reviews, etc. Now I see where all the Android fanboys get their snark from: the Android blogs themselves. You know they’re also announcing their new BBX (QNX) phones at Devcon this week too right, not just the Android player stuff. But that would get in the way of your narrative right?
You’re going to find some snark in almost any blog, but you may want to check out droid-life.com – might be more what you’re looking for…
I think Blackberry is dooming themselves. People don’t want to read a list of facts, they want to hear opinions and perspective. You don’t have to agree with my opinions.
Not to mention, my continued admiration for Apple and comments praising iOS should illustrate I don’t buy into much fanboism. I have opinions and I share them. I think Blackberry is pretty screwed unless they change something big. Microsoft is too rich to fail and I’ll be sad if WebOS disappears for good- it had a TON of potential.
tough!
android owners are mainly ex- windows mobile guys. we are bitter and not happy…UNLESS we have our droid and smash talking everyone else. deal with it!
on another note, best app reviews are from the market (market.android.com) everything else is warfare over here (havent you seen the verizon commercials??)
I really think Blackberry would be better off just making Android phones. While QNX looks like a great operating system, it just doesn’t have the apps. I know they’re trying to use Android apps to prop QNX up, but then why not just use Android? And with the Android app player, where is the incentive for developers to even make specific QNX apps? If they even bother developing for QNX at all, it will likely just be the porting over of their Android app for the app player. I think Blackberry loyalists don’t so much care about the operating system, they care about the enterprise support and services and the Blackberry form factors. Both of those can still be offered with a Blackberry Android phone and they’d magically have thousands of apps.
” I think Blackberry loyalists don’t so much care about the operating system, they care about the enterprise support and services and the Blackberry form factors”
They can’t abandon support for their current apps, especially as a lot of corporate companies have their own custom made Blackberry apps. I think this is a good compromise in getting thousands of Android apps while sticking to their own OS that they control to continue to push out enterprise services.
Also the core Blackberry users *really* care about security, which is one area that RIM excels at and once again might have problems offering if hackers are able to root a RIM Android phone. Have you ever heard of a rooted or jailbroken Blackberry? As far as I’m aware of this really doesn’t happen.
Regardless of Android or Apple I think RIM just nailed their own coffin with the outages last week. Business use to be able to count on 2 things from their BBs: Security on Dependability. Say what you will about other countries and that security, but their infrastructure WAS always connected. key word being was.
I agree, if I wanted to read an arrogant article I’d go to an Apple blog. I thought Android fans were better than that .
I know. Depressing, right? I take everything I read here with a grain of salt. Android news blogging (especially Phandroid) isn’t exactly high brow journalism… but it is disappointing to see such blatant opinion and cynical bashing. sigh.
Regarding the “Fan Boy” comment, you may need to take a look in the mirror. You think anything above isn’t reality for RIM?
Playing Android Apps through the Blackberry is like playing Windows Games through WINE on Linux. Yeah it will work, but it’s nowhere near the best experience. It was only done because folks preferred Linux over Windows enough to live with it. There is no reason at this time to prefer RIM’s OS to Android.
Rim hasn’t released anything cutting edge in years. We have no desire to see them die. More competition means better software and hardware for all of us at cheaper prices. However, none of that is going to help RIM unless they release something compelling enough for an individual to pass up an Android or Apple device. Soon they will be lagging behind Microsoft, who is developing a platform that is far more competitive to what is available today.
Cool! If this means I can publish my Android apps on BerryWorld w/o learning any code, then i’m all about it!!
This seems like a great idea! It worked out really well for OS/2.
Blackberry and RIM are doomed, they have rested on their laurels for far to long, and now they are so far behind Android, iOS, and even WP7, they will never be able to catch up. Unless RIM makes some groundbreaking announcement in the next year or two, they are finished.
This was a rare smart move by RIM. As their market share has declined, and apps more and more define an OS, they are absorbing the best of Android — the development community. RIM can cut costs, focus on hardware, key software like security, and revitalize their app selection in one swift move.
It isn’t the ideal move but it is the right one for their situation. I know it is easy for people to say “oh you just need to get developers to develop for your OS”, but the reality is that it is far from easy. Microsoft has poured a lot of money and a lot of attention on getting developers and they’re still only around 30-40 thousand apps.
With it being it being such an uphill battle to get developers it is worth the try to go to where the developers are.