Slashdot Mirror
BlackBerry Devices May Run Android Apps
crankyspice writes "RIM is allegedly prepping the QNX-based operating system running their forthcoming PlayBook tablet to run Android applications, according to a Bloomberg article. As RIM has stated that the QNX platform will run at least some of its upcoming smartphones as well, this could cinch Android's status as the lingua franca of smartphone application environments, especially with BlackBerry's current market leadership and Android's explosive marketshare growth."
if you cannot beat them - emulate them
The interesting thing will be to see how it is implemented. More specifically, how they handle the sharing of phone-related resources(address books, dialer access, memory card contents, etc.)
Merely getting Dalvik, or a JVM tweaked enough to act like it, up and running on QNX would take work; but wouldn't present fundamental challenges. Nor, unless you really screwed it up, would it be more dangerous than the potentially-untrusted java applications you can run on Blackberries.
However, that also wouldn't be too terribly useful. A fair number of phone applications depend, for their usefulness, on access to some amount of the outside world. Having a completely separate address book on the blackberry side and the "android" side would get really old, really fast. On the other hand, Mr. Corporate IT, MCSE, is going to be very, very unhappy if he learns that some skeezy android application is siphoning off the internal company directory to some offshore FTP site because RIM has provided the android environment with a link to the Blackberry side.
That seems like it will be the really tricky bit(both in terms of security, and in terms of user experience elegance). In principle, the technical difficulty of dumping a tame android-compatible environment in all sorts of places isn't that high. Making it worth using, and making sure that it plays nicely with the host environment, requires more finesse....
RIM's core market are business users. This market is safe.
No, its not safe.
Android is going after business as well. (Apple pretends to, but then insists you install a music player to manage a phone).
There isn't a single mainstream business platform that Android can't interact with, securely. Sometimes with built in apps, in other cases third party apps are better. Look at TouchDown some time as merely one example.
Rim was/is the leader in this, but they can't rest on their laurels.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
QNX is one of the few systems in the world that is aged and reliable. Enough to run industrial systems. Android is a few decades behind still.