BlackBerry Testing Android Apps on Its Devices

BlackBerry Testing Android Apps on Its Devices

Last month, BGR presented an exclusive report on Android apps being tested on the Blackberry PlayBook tablet. BlackBerry has done some considerable work over the last one month and ShopSavvy has seen its app running on three more BlackBerry devices. The data was available to them through the Flurry analytics service.

*The devices running this app were:

BlackBerry 8300 ran Shop Savvy on January 31, 2011
BlackBerry 8600 ran Shop Savvy on January 17 and 24, 2011
BlackBerry 8520 ran Shop Savvy on February 7, 2011

The access was made from Waterloo, Ontario in Canada where RIM headquarters lie. The blackberry OS has support for a JVM and this is probably being made use of to run these apps on BlackBerry devices. Shop Savvy has also presented the analytics for some apprehensive users.

According to some rumors, BlackBerry was planning to use the Dalvik Virtual Machine to run these apps. However, it dropped the plan later, to develop an internal solution.

With Android having a considerably large number of apps in the market and growing faster than any other mobile OS, BlackBerry has every reason to hook on to the Android ecosystem. This will be a groundbreaking development, thereby bringing cross-platform app support for Android. Android app developers will have better scope for revenues and BlackBerry will emerge stronger in this competition where it is pitted against platforms from Android and Apple.