THINKS BLACKBERRY WILL SEE MORE APPS
POSTED BY DAN YOUNG
How many apps are there for Blackberry? Until now, not a lot.
As a development shop, DXY builds apps for Blackberry--this is one of our specialties. There are not a lot of development shops that take on the Blackberry OS; for the uninitiated, it's a daunting task. RIM did a bad job of creating a welcoming development environment. This is part of the reason there have been far fewer apps build for Blackberry than for iOS and Android.
To RIM's credit, they are starting to "get it." With the release of the Blackberry Playbook, RIM is now including something called the Android Player. What it does is allow you to run Android apps on your PlayBook. This was a brilliant move for RIM.
The Android Player is what's known as an emulator. It allows programs build for one operating system to run on another. If you have a Mac and you are running a program called VMWare to run Windows on your computer, you're running an emulator app. Using an emulator allowed RIM to open up their platform to thousands of apps overnight.
Building a strong ecosystem of apps for a new mobile OS takes a tremendous effort. RIM has not been known for doing this well over the years--until now. From our perspective, they are taking the right steps to create a new type of Blackberry, one that mature nicely.
