I'm generally not one for conspiracy theories, but after reading
What the Android App Player means for BlackBerry and reading some of the comments,
I had a thought, and I have decided against my better judgement to share it and see what people have to say about it.
This is not a rumor I read somewhere, merely spitballing.
The Playbook was released April 19th without the Android app player as we all know, but we were under the impression that an update would follow sometime in the future and bestow its greatness upon us.
Blackberry World was at the beginning of May, and this is where we saw the demo of the android player.
Fast forward to May 10th, about 2 weeks after release and only days after Blackberry World, give or take, and in the opening keynote of Google I|O, we get the announcement of Ice Cream Sandwich, the next iteration of Android which will succeed Gingerbread/Honeycomb (Uniting Phone and Tablet)
Now, I think either:
1. Google gave RIM no prior warning of the announcement of ICS
2. RIM knew about ICS but was too late to show anything but the Gingerbread player.
This iteration promises to unite the tablet and the phone, which I would assume means that apps developed for Gingerbread and a phone screen would no longer be just that, and that all apps would be compatible with ICS.
One of the comments I read in the blog post by Joseph was touching on the fact that Android apps are not native Blackberry apps and will not work natively with the Playbook. What if ICS is able to have apps run seamlessly with QNX?
Official Google Blog
Now, the leaked player resembles Gingerbread, the defacto phone OS. With Honeycomb arriving as a dedicated tablet OS, it would be hard to believe that they would leave it at 2.3, so maybe development was shifted to Honeycomb somewhere before April 19th, and then was forced to shift again with the announcement of ICS in May?
Maybe someone can clarify if Google releases source code to hardware manufacturers before the source code is publicly released?
Thoughts, comments, concerns on this wacko theory?