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RIM Changes Stance On PlayBook's Android Support
hypnosec writes "It hasn't been long since the BlackBerry maker Research In Motion announced that its QNX based tablet device, the PlayBook, will be supporting Android implementation on it. However, it has been revealed now that a sizable portion of Android apps will be cut off from running on the moderately successful tablet device. The news thus leads us to a situation where Android developers might not be interested anymore in coming up with new apps for the QNX powered gadget. The Android apps that won't be working in the PlayBook include Android Live Wallpapers; apps that contain more than one activity tied to the launcher, the Android text-to-speech engine, and Android cloud-to-device messaging service, amongst a few others."
The limitations are pretty obvious, ya know? Without access to the closed source bits of Android RIM isn't going to be able to support some parts of the Google APIs and unless they want to turn the home screen over to Android, in which case it becomes an Android device that runs RIM apps, wallpapers and home screen widgets are probably out.
Of course this throws the hybrid model of Android into sharp relief. It ain't Open Source and it sure as heck ain't Free Software.
Democrat delenda est
It was always clear since the announcement that the android apps would be running inside a dedicated android runtime. like running it in a VM.
why is anyone surprised that a vm client cannot affect the wallpaper on the host?
I thought we were talking about "a moderately successful tablet device", not "a near-total failure".
Sure, it sound like the opposite of open to cull features, but is this a question of even less software freedom or just about different non-free features?
I recently had my first encounter with Android and motherfuck! There were icons on the thing that I could not remove. That's not like any gnu/linux I've known.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
At first it sounds like a facepalm move, but then you get to what they didn't bother implementing:
At this point I'm laughing at the overblown sensationalism. The author's credibility for bothering to write about this molehill is seriously threatened..
Ok, there's a few less-trivial-sounding things there. I don't even know what they are. Maybe the activity-tied-to-launcher or cloud-to-device thing (by any chance is it really Google-closed-API-to-device?) is something that someone will give a fuck about. I don't know. But this dude sure started off with a stupid example.
Just leave it be.
And the last thing.
I've yet to see a playbook in the store, yet alone in the wild, and the rumours from RIM employees are a firesale soon. This latest revelation is more kindling and parafin to the bonfire IMO.
Playbook could have been so good given its architecture and security features, but instead they ruined it with that cheesy "Flash!" advertisement on TV. Every person I know that was aware of the product instantly pigeon-holed it as a bit too geeky. Ho humm.
I just picked up a Playbook (because they've already plummeted in price, and I wanted to try one out), and when I heard someone tell me the Android support had changed, I got a little freaked out.
Then I read the list of things that won't work and rolled my eyes, because they're all non-issues.
What a waste of time this story and linked article are. Move along, nothing to see here.
Maybe they reduced their support for Android apps because they didn't want their platform infested with malware?
;)
...relax...i kid, i kid
Only a Message Dialog Box saying 'Hello World' will be suported
I think they just need to cut their losses and go the HTC route. Forget your own OS and make a great skin for Android. Perhaps they can make "super apps" that only run on their machines.
Quite frankly, that summary makes it sound like they want to support Android apps, but can't always do it because of their technical limitations.
My other suggestion is they just try to get MS to buy them. If MS doesn't want them, they should try to sell themselves to HTC.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
So anything that relies on the device layer is not going to be supported (Sound, Frame-Buffer, etc). Any respectable nerd would already know this.
The old slashdot would have posted a detailed story on why some Android Apps will not work on the Blackberry/iPhone/Win7 phone etc.
Enjoy.
It's just the normal noises in here.
Disclaimer: I have never owned an android device, and my experience is quite limited.
AFAIK, when you install an app it asks your permission to do a number of tasks(update x, send messages, place calls ect...) Perhaps this limitation allows apps to do only one of those things. EG. a multimedia app that formerly played audio over bluetooth(task 1) and prevented your phone from sleep mode(task 2) is now crippled so it can do just one of those things
Watch out for QNX, it's a beast of a multitasking OS, and it's not going anywhere.
Yep, you're right about it not going anywhere
Watch out for QNX, it's a beast of a multitasking OS, and it's not going anywhere.
At least, not until RIM's two delusion, washed-up CEOs finish driving RIM into the ground and all the ``intellectual property'' is stripped and sold to an SCO work-alike for lawsuit purposes.
I can't believe they will honestly try to claim "Android Compatibility" when one of the "restrictions" is that it doesn't support "apps that contain more than one activity tied to the launcher" - so, any game that has an about screen, any app that does more than one thing, any app at all that has a built-in config screen...
Note: if "more than one activity" is their bar, then even a text editor (other than the built-in post-it widget) won't work.
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Wonder if any of that is motivated by avoiding patents. Samsung just signed an agreement to pay Microsoft a fee for each Android phone sold to lessen its exposure to Microsoft's legal moves against Google. Another company that did that (motorola?) paid MS $5 per phone.
Wonder if these apps lessen the amount of IP possibly being infringed upon.
More than one activity tied directly to the launcher, not more than one activity period.
When they have the firesale in another couple months, we can just put Cyanogen on it.
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This is awesome news! (I should mention that I have Put options on RIM.)
These "missing features" are mostly due to not having Google services, which the Fire will also lack.
Not only is Google Maps missing, but any app that pops up a map itself will also break. Cloud-to-device messaging requires Google's servers. In-app billing, ditto. The text-to-speech and SIP VoIP components are also (AFAIK) specific to Google devices.
None of these features work on any non-Google-experience devices, including the Fire, the Playbook, the Nook Color, and all the cheapo crappy tablets too.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Is this a 'Change of Stance', ie a change of what had previously been announced, or more of a clarification/refining the details? I may be wrong but I don't recall RIM saying anything other than 'will have future Android support', which is kind of vague
fucking stupid BB Torch that randomly calls whores
Is there an app for that? no, seriously?
-- Flame me and I will happily flame you back. Bring it!
I would love to see more of this bad news, so the abomination that is RIM can die once and for all. The company is a joke, the products are a joke, and I'm sure all those engineers and developers would be put to better use elsewhere in the industry. Maybe someplace that isn't run by two boneheaded "co-CEOs" with zero ambition and zero vision, and perhaps a few less PHBs ruining the rest.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
A friend of mine bought one, and I can confirm that it sucks ass. Not unlike the new BB phones. I will not be buying any more RIM products, and I have heard the same from many people. I didn't play with it extensively...
This got upvoted? There's not a single reasonable criticism in here. I've got a Playbook, and I use it constantly. I've never had a problem with the USB port, and the battery lasts me several days of intermittent use or around 3 movies on a flight. I honestly don't get the hate. If you have legitimate criticism, lets hear it - but what you've said here has no substance.
randomly calls whores and puts them on a three-way call with my girlfriend when I take it out of the holster
I have played with one too, and it is not as bad as you say it is, but without Android support it is going to be practically worthless. Your entire post has an extremely acerbic tone to it.
Perhaps there is an entire article, or possibly a movie screenplay, about the "whores", your girlfriend, and the hilarious shenanigans with your phone.
Questions. Questions. Questions.
1) Are these actual whores being called by your phone, or is the "whore" a characterization from your girlfriend?
2) Is the Torch in possession of AI sufficient to determine if a contact is in fact a whore?
3) Can the Torch apply something like least cost routing to your selection of whore contacts? Availability?
4) Why do you keep so many "whore" contacts in your phone?
5) Statistically speaking, how can the Torch alone be responsible for 3-way'n so many whores with your girlfriend? Not the good 3-way either obviously.
6) Have other phones in the past accidentally dialed contacts in your vast whore repo before?
Seriously. I don't think I am the only person here who wants to know more about this.
Please continue.
"randomly calls whores and puts them on a three-way call with my girlfriend"
Somehow - I think you'd be a douche no matter what. But, blame it on the phone, if it makes you feel better. "Yeah, people, if I had a better phone, I wouldn't be such a douche!"
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
The Playbook does not need to make money. It needs to keep RIM in the corporate conversation long enough for them to make a more compelling argument for their existence.
How do you keep a company in the "corporate conversation" by naming a product with "Play" prominently in the title, and focusing on media consumption in advertising and demonstration?
Your paragraph is something RIM needed to read before they hit the drawing boards - or the boardroom.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Seriously, what basis is there for calling the Playook moderately successful. You might (maybe) call the Tab moderately successful. The playbook drops in price every week. That is no kind of successful but un.
But it does raise a question of what the hell they're doing trying to be compatible with Android at all. If RIM supports Android apps, why should 3rd parties bother writing native apps at all? It's OS/2 vs Windows all over again. OS/2 2.1 and OS/2 Warp 3.0 allowed users to run Windows 3.x as a subsystem so what was the net result? Very few native apps and the slow death of the platform. You need an growing community of interested parties, not some blow-ins with little vested interest in the platform if it is to survive.
I suppose the point of this story is that there seems to be something in the water for big corporation's CEOs. HP's binning of the disastrous Apoteker, and now RIMs continual slide into irrelevance.
What RIM had with BB was a rock solid, entrenched-in-corporate-enterprise messaging platform. Trusted. Secure communication and secure devices with real on-device encryption, remote wipe etc. They had all this in a time before cheap, consumer smartphones did decent messaging and before Exchange ActiveSync etc was on iOS, Android and Windows Phone.
What they have now is a product that is totally outdated from a hardware and software perspective compared to the competition, their core messaging business is under attack from cheaper EAS (and CEOs that want to use an iPhone!), and they've squandered their reputation for security by allowing various governments across the world backdoor access to their systems.
Then they launch the Playbook. A device no-one asked for, that didn't even have messaging built into it on launch. The went up against Apple, Android and Windows Phone's ecosystems with pretty much nothing. No target market, not a chance in hell of competing in the consumer or enterprise space on features (no ecosystem), on price (Apple's purchase of their components outright in massive quantities means you can't build iPad quality devices cheaper than Apple can, and Android is owning the lower end) or anywhere else.
Doomed from the start - it'll be on firesale within the month, just like the HP Touchpad*
RIP RIM. I think your patent IP are probably the only value in the company right now.
* I have 2 firesale Touchpads. I really like WebOS and they were a bargain for the price. However at least WebOS has PreWare and a homebrew dev community and is pretty vibrant - see the recent massive resurgence in interest when they went on discount. It's the 2nd most popular tablet in the world now!
Whether a 2nd firesale-price tablet from RIM would be attractive to as many people is debatable...
Requiring a user to bridge their phone to their tablet just to read email through a dumb proxy has to be one of the most monumentally stupid design decisions I've ever heard about. The cited reason of security makes little sense. If they wanted to secure email they could have encrypted it on the device and put a strong PIN / password / gesture protection over the top. It is far more likely their server and/or software was so baroque that porting it to the playbook proved more difficult than they thought.
Assuming they overcome these problems, perhaps they can salvage something from this mess. They still have a reputation as being enterprise friendly so assuming the PlayBook fixes its most egregious issues it may yet find itself being used in places that would run a mile from iPad or Android devices.
This depends on if the app will ru, but simply not use the listed capabilities vs. if any app using these capabilities will not run.
If it is the former, no big deal. If it is the latter, this would make a huge number of apps on the market unrunnable.