[BlackQtCoder]

Yeh.. i know and i apologize for that.. because i cant make a new thread.

Posted via BlackBerry z10 (CB)

Don't worry, your opinion will be always welcomed Your avatar is funny!

[systemvolker]

Don't worry, your opinion will be always welcomed Your avatar is funny!

Haha ...yours is cool

Posted via BlackBerry z10 (CB)

[ubizmo]

Surely an Android app is better than no app?

Absolutely. There is no question in my mind that there are many apps that would never make it to BB10 otherwise. The presence of Android ports allows BB10, a new OS, to have some app momentum right from the start, and that's important. As more users come to the platform and start buying apps, the competition for the better apps heats up. If the better apps tend to be native coded for BB10, there's an incentive to write such apps. There will even be an incentive for the developers of existing Android ports to invest the time to upgrade them to native.

As long as the BB10 user base grows, the market pressure will be in favor of native apps. If there were no Android ports to start with, there wouldn't be much market pressure of any sort.

[Pete The Penguin]

Absolutely. There is no question in my mind that there are many apps that would never make it to BB10 otherwise. The presence of Android ports allows BB10, a new OS, to have some app momentum right from the start, and that's important. As more users come to the platform and start buying apps, the competition for the better apps heats up. If the better apps tend to be native coded for BB10, there's an incentive to write such apps. There will even be an incentive for the developers of existing Android ports to invest the time to upgrade them to native.

As long as the BB10 user base grows, the market pressure will be in favor of native apps. If there were no Android ports to start with, there wouldn't be much market pressure of any sort.

So basically, get the earlier adopters angry enough to get behind BB and push development forward? Clever strategy, if it works.

Posted via CB10

[ubizmo]

So basically, get the earlier adopters angry enough to get behind BB and push development forward? Clever strategy, if it works.

Posted via CB10

I don't know if it'll take the form of anger or just pressure. People will leave comments on apps, pushing for native versions. Native apps will rise to the top; expectations will be raised.

[Pete The Penguin]

Summary: The QNX operating system that runs at the core of BlackBerry 10 devices can run Android applications. But does that undermine native development for the aspiring smartphone platform?

In March, BlackBerry (formerly Research In Motion) made an announcement that its BlackBerry 10 App World has reached the 100,000 app milestone.
While I applaud the sheer numbers of apps that their developers have been able to seed the store with in such a short period of time for the Z10's US carrier launch, BlackBerry, untill very recently, has not been forthcoming as to what kind of apps they were.
It's been confirmed that approximately 20 percent of the applications in the BlackBerry 10 App world are in fact, re-packaged Android apps.

Back in Q1 2011, RIM had finally confirmed what had been rumored for months: That its then-new PlayBook tablet, which runs on the same fundamental QNX operating system that BlackBerry 10 uses, would be able to run Android applications in addition to Adobe Air, HTML5, and native C/C++ QNX apps.

A "Better Android than Android", if you may.

The more I wrap my head around the whole thing, the more I begin to feel like I've seen this happen before.

In fact, it was 20 years ago. The vendor who last tried to do this was ... IBM, with its OS/2 2.0 Operating System.

This is going to open up old wounds for me, and I'll probably catch some flak for this, but considering that this war between Microsoft and IBM is long over, I'm going to do this anyway.

For the most part, in 1992, IBM succeeded in creating a "Better DOS than DOS and a better Windows than Windows" with OS/2.

It was a full 32-bit OS, and could take advantage of much larger amounts of memory, which DOS and Windows 3.0 could not. It could pre-emptively multitask, whereas Microsoft's DOS and Windows 3.0 could not.

It could protect native OS/2 applications in discrete sections of memory, whereas DOS and Windows 3.0 could not.

It could also run DOS and Windows 3.0 applications in their own protected, separate regions of memory, which DOS and Windows could not.

It was the first PC operating system to ship with Windows virtualization included in the OS. It was amazingly ahead of its time, in that respect.

OS/2 ran DOS and Windows 3.0 applications so well, in fact, that IBM had a very hard time getting third-party developers to write native OS/2 Presentation Manager applications.

Indeed, there were a few little gotchas with OS/2's Windows compatibility: It had problems for a time running Windows Enhanced Mode apps, and there were also issues with special types of device drivers, called VxDs.

Eventually, IBM was able to resolve most of these compatibility issues in future versions of OS/2. But it was always a constant battle to keep up with Microsoft's changes. And when Microsoft released Windows NT 3.1 in 1993, most of the perceived advantages that OS/2 had were no longer considered exclusive by the computer industry.

Today, you recognize Windows NT as Windows 8, Windows 7, and Windows XP. And Windows 2000 before it.

BlackBerry is facing a very similar situation with its new mobile OS. Indeed, the QNX OS as it is implemented on BlackBerry's hardware is extremely impressive, resilient, and sophisticated.

This is to be expected of a mature, embedded real-time OS, which QNX is. For everything that distinguishes them, iOS, Android, and even Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 are not RTOSes.

As a matter of fact, I believe it to be a superior operating system in a number of respects architecturally to both iOS and Android which set it apart from both.

However, despite BlackBerry's RTOS DNA, there is a great deal of risk associated with attempting to leverage a competitor's ecosystem as opposed to being an active participant in it.

Originally, I had hoped that BlackBerry went the Virtualization route as opposed to a native Dalvik VM port/binary emulation layer to implement Android compatibility, which is how it actually went about it.

Ideally, for BlackBerry 10, I would have liked to have seen a full Android 4.x stack running inside a mobile hypervisor, such as OKL4 or Red Bend's VLX.

This would have required no "porting" work on RIM's behalf. Instead, an actual copy of Android, with a complete Linux kernel, could be run as a "Guest" OS within QNX. But it was not to be.

This is not to say that this approach would not have its own number of risks associated with it. The hypervisor would have to be very performance optimized, and near-native Android performance would be expected by BlackBerry 10's end users, or the compatibility mode would not have much value.

To make Android NDK apps work, hypervisor-based virtualization would have been the only effective way to accomplish true binary compatibility. But as BlackBerry 10 uses just the Dalvik part of Android, it can't run NDK apps. Those applications have to be ported using the native C/C++QNX SDK instead.

It should be noted that BlackBerry's Android 2.3.3 API implementation already has a number of other programmatic limitations in addition to the NDK.

Regardless of the way BlackBerry eventually chose to implement Android apps in its new mobile OS, there is the issue of whether Android compatibility will have the same "cooling effect" on its native C++ development environment as well as on the Adobe Air apps that IBM's Windows 3.0 compatibility had on OS/2.

There is another potential problem, and it isn't a small concern.

There is always the possibility that Google could implement architectural and code changes in its Dalvik VM as part of the Android Open Source Project in the future that could break BlackBerry's Dalvik implementation and cause serious compatibility issues with apps written to future versions of the Android API (Google Reminds Developers They Cant Update Apps Except With Googles Update Mechanism - http://www.droid-life.com/2013/04/25...y-at-facebook/).

Should this occur, BlackBerry would need to re-port Google's Dalvik to QNX, on an ongoing basis, in order to keep up with the changes. The level of effort involved would not be insignificant, much like IBM had to keep OS/2's Windows compatibility in check.

Amazon's Kindle Fire also runs Android apps, and the company maintains its own app store. But the Kindle Fire is an Android device, based on actual AOSP code and Linux, whereas BlackBerry 10 emulates Android and runs a QNX kernel and userland libraries.

So the Kindle Fire will never have compatibility issues with Android, providing that Amazon always uses the latest AOSP stack.

Still, BlackBerry might not actually care what developers target their apps to, whether it's Android 2.3 Dalvik APIs, QNX native (Cascades or not), Adobe Air/Flash, or Java.

Oh, and then there's the WebWorks platform SDK as well. BlackBerry 10 is a literal smorgasbord of multi-vendor API's, probably the richest of all the mobile OSes currently available.

The big question is whether BlackBerry 10 will do all of them well. Will consumers "get it" and will developers bother to make enough native QNX apps to really showcase the platform?

I mean, if you're gonna buy a phone to run Android apps, why not just buy a HTC One that sports superior hardware in virtually every respect to the Z10?

Only time will tell.

Posted via CB10

[blindguy]

I think the Android compatibility was just to help jump start the new BB10 platform until more native apps are built. Who knows if BlackBerry will continue to enhance this feature for years to come? I hope they will.

Posted via CB10

[Johny 5]

They don't run as smoothly which is what I don't like. If they can create a port for it then why not spend extra time and make it into a native app instead (obviously talking about the apps that have been ported by the developers not ones that you have to install with the bar files)

Posted via CB10

The developers don't do a traditional "port" on their android app they do the same as users here on crackberry do to apk files they use blackberry tools to repackage the apk into a bar file then they sign it...

Although there are some developers that actually have to change some of their code to work on the emulated android java runtime built into the blackberry 10 os, like skype (I believe). I have tested skype and it runs as smooth as a native app, so I'm sure any android app would run good when it is properly "ported".

I believe the main issue with android apps running on the blackberry z10 is the emulated java runtime itself. Once blackberry works out the glitches and perfects it then apps will run better.

Also another issue with android ports is simply the way the developer wrote the app and how android handles it. Not too long ago I was using a android phone running 2.3.3 and the way that operating system was running the app felt just as slugish/buggy and slow as the z10 (just without the force close annoyance the z10 sometimes has)...

There are probably many reasons why converted android apps run buggy on the z10 but that is why i bought a z10 so I could have the stability of a blackberry because honestly the entire android operating system is slugish and buggy to me... but like others have said a android port is a lot better than no app at all. I have no complains of android apps, I do prefer native (who doesn't) but if there isn't a native just don't use it if you don't want to

[Pete The Penguin]

The developers don't do a traditional "port" on their android app they do the same as users here on crackberry do to apk files they use blackberry tools to repackage the apk into a bar file then they sign it...

Although there are some developers that actually have to change some of their code to work on the emulated android java runtime built into the blackberry 10 os, like skype (I believe). I have tested skype and it runs as smooth as a native app, so I'm sure any android app would run good when it is properly "ported".

I believe the main issue with android apps running on the blackberry z10 is the emulated java runtime itself. Once blackberry works out the glitches and perfects it then apps will run better.

Also another issue with android ports is simply the way the developer wrote the app and how android handles it. Not too long ago I was using a android phone running 2.3.3 and the way that operating system was running the app felt just as slugish/buggy and slow as the z10 (just without the force close annoyance the z10 sometimes has)...

There are probably many reasons why converted android apps run buggy on the z10 but that is why i bought a z10 so I could have the stability of a blackberry because honestly the entire android operating system is slugish and buggy to me... but like others have said a android port is a lot better than no app at all. I have no complains of android apps, I do prefer native (who doesn't) but if there isn't a native just don't use it if you don't want to

The Android Runtime is 2.3, hence slow Android ports (repackaged apps).
While 10.1 isn't getting Android 4.1, the runtime is getting hardware acceleration.

Posted via CB10

[Anilu7]

Native apps that are made for Blackberry will have a m symbol at the top in the app store I forgot what the t and g icons were.

CB10- z10

No, M is for Mature audiences, T for teen and G for general.

[Mecca EL]

If you use device programs like DDPB or vnBB10, these tools can distinguish between native and android apps, in and on the device.

Posted via CB10

[Pete The Penguin]

If you use device programs like DDPB or vnBB10, these tools can distinguish between native and android apps, in and on the device.

Posted via CB10

Hasn't vnBB10 replaced DDPB now?

Posted via CB10 from my Q10.

[abass]

If it's Built for BlackBerry certified then it's not an android app. Just download BfB certified apps.