RIM Confirms Android Apps Will Run On Playbook, Through Intermediate Players

angry tapir writes "Research In Motion has announced that users of its PlayBook tablet will be able to run Android and Java applications. The PlayBook, which becomes available on April 19, will have two optional 'app players' that will provide run-time environments for BlackBerry Java apps and Android 2.3 apps. The players will let users download BlackBerry Java Apps and Android Apps from BlackBerry App World."

Comments

Quality

[exomondo]

I wonder how the quality of the BB ecosystem will go over time though, sure it's a boon to have access to all the Android apps but will people develop native PlayBook apps knowing that they could just develop an Android one that runs on the PB *and* on Android devices?

Re:Quality

[TD-Linux]

No, when they support the 2.3 API (revision 10), they also support all API versions below that. In fact, Google encourages developers to target the lowest possible API level to support needed features, to maximize compatibility.

Re:Quality

[davester666]

Don't forget that for you to be able to load an app, it HAS to be from the BlackBerry Store. Even if it's an Android app. No side loading one yourself. No downloading from Amazon or the Android store.

So you can ONLY download an Android app if:
-it's designed for use on a phone [no Android tablet apps]
-the developer has signed up as a BlackBerry developer, signed and faxed the various documents to them, then uploaded their app to the store
-RIM has approved their app for sale

Somehow, I don't think most of the Android apps will be uploaded to the Blackberry store, and I don't think users will give a great value to having access to only the Android phone apps on their shiny new tablet. And people with Android phones will be doubly annoyed at having to repurchase any apps they want to use on their Playbook [assuming the apps are available, and of course, I see this group being very small, as the Playbook still seems to want to be tethered to a Blackberry phone].

Re:Quality

[narcc]

Don't forget that for you to be able to load an app, it HAS to be from the BlackBerry Store

Sorry, where did you run across this? You've been able to load apps of all sorts from virtually any source on BB for years -- why would this change on the PB?

I've been following this pretty closely, and RIM has certainly not mentioned anything remotely like this.

No, I don't believe a word of this. Your post is FUD, plain and simple.

Re:Quality

[narcc]

It would not suprise me if they (at some point in the future) move to a core Android OS

I doubt it. RIM bought QNX last year which will debut on the PlayBook. Rumor has it that RIM will adapt the OS for use on their upcoming line of smartphones, putting an end to their aging OS.

Re:Quality

[ChunderDownunder]

It's a pity Slashdot linked to some pay-per-click summary instead of the actual press release.

Developers will simply repackage, code sign and submit their BlackBerry Java and Android apps to BlackBerry App World. Once approved, the apps will be distributed through BlackBerry App World, providing a new opportunity for many developers to reach BlackBerry PlayBook users. Users will be able to download both the app players and the BlackBerry Java and Android apps from BlackBerry App World.

At least for Android, it sounds pretty clear that they're cutting Google's store out of the picture.

Re:Quality

[yuri benjamin]

I wonder how the quality of the BB ecosystem will go over time though, sure it's a boon to have access to all the Android apps but will people develop native PlayBook apps knowing that they could just develop an Android one that runs on the PB *and* on Android devices?

I think this was one of IBM's mistakes with OS/2 Warp. It ran Win3.1 and DOS apps so well that no-one made native apps for OS/2.

Re:Quality

[ArhcAngel]

Such a device would also have full Exchange support without having to have fscking BES. That would be amazing.

That would be amazingly awful. There is a reason companies go with RIM's solution and it has everything to do with the BB/BES (client/server). For starters it is so secure not even your companies IT department or RIM itself can easily intercept data (They can still get to it easily on the Exchange server). Add to that the near bulletproof reliability (yes there have been notable exceptions and they are so noted) compared to Activesync (goes down at least once a month here) and the fact I frequently get emails on my BB BEFORE I get it in Outlook (Good luck with that on Activesync).

Sideloading

[Nerdfest]

I hope they're not afraid of a little competition and allow side-loading and other app stores. It's be a shame to see yet another device that you don't really own.

This is a great move for RIM

[Anthony Mouse]

Doing this gives Blackberry devices a chance to compete on merit instead of on how many apps they have. And it gives developers a unified target for app development -- make an Android app and it will run on both Android devices and Blackberries, which strengthens both platforms at the expense of their other competitors.

This is what Nokia should have done.

Re:This is a great move for RIM

[Anthony Mouse]

You understand that you as a developer can just pick one to use and not worry about the others, don't you? More is better.

And the idea that apps have to be packaged for Blackberry is no real impediment if the packaging process is sufficiently automated. If they can get it to where all an Android developer has to do is check the box that says "package for Blackberry" then there won't really be any reason not to do it.

Re:This is a great move for RIM

[Mr_Silver]

Doing this gives Blackberry devices a chance to compete on merit instead of on how many apps they have. And it gives developers a unified target for app development -- make an Android app and it will run on both Android devices and Blackberries, which strengthens both platforms at the expense of their other competitors.

Seems like a poor idea to me as it means developers won't specifically target the playbook, instead relying on their existing Android developments.

OS/2 suffered the same problem with it's Windows compatibility. No-one actually wrote anything for it as they just targetted Windows instead knowing that it running on OS/2 was an addition benefit.

Whilst it may mean they get access to hundreds of applications immediately, the longer they leave it, the more dependent they are on maintaining compatibility with Android in order for their platform to succeed - and they could have got themselves into that mess far cheaper and easier by just releasing an Android tablet.

java is a success story

[Anonymous Coward]

Since its introduction, it has taken the world by storm. Applications run perfectly anywhere.
Write once. Run on Mac, Windows, Linux. Works great. Threads, networking. And it is
also very secure as applications are sandboxed.

Combined with XML, RMI, JB, servlets, SWING, ACID, JVM, WORA, API, JRE, JEE,
JIT, JDK, CORBA, IIOP, JDBC, AWT, NIO, etc. it offers a powerful environment.
And it is object oriented that is OO!

And pretty much all universities teach it. Did you know even Oracle is partly written
in Java, it has improved their product tremendously! All desktop computers com
with Java preinstalled - working perfectly. And most applications these days
are also in Java - if nothing else this should prove its superiority.

Also java made everything simple. They banished unsigned types. Thread
based networking, very slim runtime, easy web applets that are everywhere
these days, everything is an Object, no memory corruption/crashes so even
a monkey can write code (you don't need to know what you're doing
to be a java programmer, isn't that great), take threads, so easy anyone
is encouraged to add them into their application. Java code is also
very easy to read but still very compact.

The creators of Java did the industry a great service. I salute them!

iOS app player

[lazyBob]

With iOS app player, PlayBook can be the real iphone killer :)

Re:iOS app player

[shutdown -p now]

You can't copyright an API.

Re:efficiency

[Sir_Sri]

I'm not sure limited hardware is fair. Dual core 1GHz, 1 Gig of ram is going to be pretty much on par with dual core smart phones or smaller tablets.

The software side of things... I'm skeptical but you never know. Though RIM is aiming for the business crowd, not home users, so if its gaming performance on android apps is horrid I'm not sure that's a huge problem.

Clever

[ieatcookies]

Wise choice

Let's wait for the benchmarks, shall we?

[ChunderDownunder]

It's possible Dalvik apps could run *faster* on the new Blackberry than on Android!

QNX is an embedded RTOS that's allegedly light years ahead of Linux for certain things. If RIM have managed to port Dalvik to QNX minus the design choices of Google's Linux-fork, Dalvik could seem just as 'native' on QNX than the 'official' Android.

questionable move

[LodCrappo]

We've seen this strategy before (sort of) in OS/2.. running your competitors software seems like a good thing when you don't have much native software, but in the end it just undermines the market for native software and leads to the obvious question of why someone wouldn't just buy your competitors platform in the first place.
Maybe RIM will be able to provide enough unique value to maintain sales, they do have a massive presence in the business world. OTOH, IBM had a pretty big influence in business computing and OS/2 had a lot of unique capabilities.

Maybe they figured they were screwed anyway and this is just a move to extend the platform's life a while longer.

"Complicated and boring"

[Kupfernigk]

You're a developer and you find registering for a web site too complicated and boring? And you create css stylesheets? You then propose that the OS should create boilerplate and provide auto logins?

Who was it said that UI interface designers mostly wouldn't recognise security if it stood in front of them with its name in big red letters an a T-shirt and hit them with a clue bat till they got the point? Probably me.

Re:This can only shake out one way!

[gl4ss]

**There can be only one major platform in the end.**

what is this end you speak of? 2012? or perhaps 2032? that there will be one dominant end platform is an investor day dream, of an investor who was born yesterday. platforms come and go. operating systems come and go. stupid ui fashions come and go, sdk's come and go, middleware vm's come and go. code styles come and go. chipsets come and go. companies and their assets come and go and get sold and resold.

but rock'n'roll is forever and some things last longer than others, which is handy so I can run a 10 year old program that I want to run, in a modern os with modern graphics acceleration that makes the program work better than ever before for me. and I wouldn't bet that android is going to be a platform that surprises me like this the next time.

as for the tablet ui's and solutions coming to market now, they're just short-live toys tied to the hardware they were sold on. it's all temporary even more so than the stuff in the 80's.

the only mobile programs that I wrote ~7years ago or so that still work on devices I can pick up from any mall are the j2me progs that I made back then(without any changes, too. the games were resolution agnostic to a point, and some touchscreen phones, like from nokia, make do with onscreen buttons for legacy apps).