Even with the best will in the World, BlackBerry hasn’t a hope in hell of catching up with Android or the iPhone in the apps war, so if you can’t beat them join them.
The constant criticism that the Blackberry is getting for its poor showing in the app department – 10+k apps and that’s it – has obviously started to annoy RIM. So much so that they’re starting to make BlackBerry’s run Android apps.
Website Shopsavvy has released some Flurry graphs that show its Android app being used by several different BlackBerry devices and the users of those BlackBerry devices are all based close to RIM’s headquarters in Canada. According to the Shopsavvy blog
BlackBerry users have been bugging us for two years to release ShopSavvy on BlackBerry, but to date they have been disappointed. Well according to ShopSavvy’s flurry logs someone in Waterloo, Ontario (Canada for the geographically challenged oh and BTW it wheres RIM is based) has been running ShopSavvy for Android on various BlackBerry devices.
Earlier this month Rachel King wrote a ZDNet story suggesting that BlackBerry’s new PlayBook tablet is going to support Android apps. This makes sense since BlackBerry OS can support Java Virtual Machines and it would be pretty easy to compile Android in one of the them.
According to various rumours RIM are also set to port the Dalvik Virtual Machine – it’s part of the Android runtime system – to run on future versions of its BlackBerry platform, which will be based on the QNX operating system which underpins its BlackBerry Tablet OS. Earlier this month, Myriad Group announced a version of Dalvik “Alien Dalvik” which would run on Symbian and in theory on other platforms.
Coincidence, accident or real. The BlackBerry phone sells well, it was number one in the UK in December, so Android and BlackBerry could be a real force to be reckoned with. It would also make Android apps the Business users choice of app, and that could be worth billions?
Here’s a video of an Android app running on a Nokia Symbian device