This one has been rumoured for a good few months now, but today Research In Motion Ltd. made it official with their plans to give their existing app selection a huge boost, by adding support for Android apps in their upcoming tablet, the PlayBook.
In a press release the Canadian mobile giant laid out their plans to release two app players “that provide an application run-time environment for BlackBerry Java apps and Android v2.3 apps.”
How these two run-times will co-exists alongside each other is not detailed heavily, however the two “app players” will both be available for download from BlackBerry App World, and will allow Android and Java apps to run in a “sandbox” on the PlayBook. Although this isn’t a hugely elegant solution, we’re betting prospective PlayBook users will be willing to sacrifice a little usability for access to Android’s 200,000-plus apps. RIM President Mike Laziridis promises the porting process for apps currently in development will be painless.
The announcement has been rumoured for a few months, and were re-enforced last month when an Android app developer spotted evidence of their app running on BlackBerry handsets in their logs.
The move is a slam-dunk for RIM, whose comparatively spartan App World has been a missing string in the companies bow for the last few years. The inclusion will also please Google Inc., who make money from both app sales and in-app advertising on Android – opening their apps up to a whole other operating system will improve their reach, and in turn their income, drastically.
