Just last week we brought you word that a company had developed a software solution to allow Android apps to run on MeeGo devices, now it appears similar forces are at work in the world of Blackberry. Several revelations in the past few days are now strongly pointing towards the appearance of some kind of runtime to allow Android apps to be put to work on the traditionally App-phobic Blackberry OS.
In theory the implementation would be relatively simple, very similar to the aforementioned Alien Dalvik, in fact. Whether the source of these rumours are the same company – Myriad Group – or an internal RIM project is currently unclear.
Exhibit A comes from popular barcode scanning App ShopSavvy. According to the company’s logs, their App was run on three separate Blackberry handsets (the 8300, 8600 and 8520) in January. Coincidentally, the location of the devices in question was Waterloo, Ontario, Canada – you’ll never guess which handset manufacturer is based there.
Exhibit B comes in the form of a video from Mobile World Congress, in which a RIM representative spills the beans on Android Apps during a demonstration of RIM’s new tablet, the Playbook.
We’ve been hearing rumblings about this kind of strange OS / App cross-pollination since back in January, but now actual evidence has appeared we’re more willing to pay it lip service. There are still several major hurdles, for example how will popular Apps such as Twitter and Facebook – which run partially portrait-only – will be handled in RIM’s many landscape-format handsets. The disparity between hardware is another possible issue (think Android’s dedicated Back, Menu, Home and Search buttons).
Nonetheless if these rumours do come to fruition, it would be an incredibly smooth move on the part of RIM, whose App offerings have been left severely wanting in the face of increasing Android and iOS competition.
