I recently had a crazy idea that I'd thought I'd share with the Crackberry community:
What if BlackBerry developed a runtime (similar to the Android Runtime) that repackaged native playbook apps to android compatible apps. I understand that the android player is a stop gap for app tonnage, but a android runtime (working the opposite way) would certaintly solve the problem of having half working android apps on the Playbook while still giving developers the ability to expand their market. This would incentivize developers to develop apps for the Playbook/BBX which they can then easily port to android and have instant access to another market. Since the apps are built to work natively on BlackBerry, they would be higher quality (at least on BlackBerrys).
I realize that the technical aspects of this might make it unfeasible or unlikely. Also, BlackBerry would probably hesistate to open its developers to another platform.
What do others think about such an idea? good or bad?
In all seriousness, it wouldn't be a good idea for RIM to bolster any other ecosystem with it's apps, RIM has allowed the android runtime in attempt to reduce the lack or apps that it has relative to larger ecosystems. Rim needs to be on the receiving end now.
Also in seriousness now, technically I suspect it would be extraordinarily difficult to make this work, since the truly native apps (built with NDK) will make use of dozens, even hundreds of libraries that exist only on the PlayBook and not Android. You'd have to bundle them with the app (among a dozen other major hurdles) and even a simple game would end up being 200MB.
It wouldn't neccesarily work since in my learning, Android apps minus NDK built ones, are java. Java needs a jvm, and Android uses the dalvik jvm. RIM's ported the dalvik jvm to the playbook, meaning it can run java, the point of is to be run multi-platform.
Playbook apps are built with AIR, C/C++, or HTML5. AIR and HTML5 would work, but one would have to recompile the C/C++, or NDK, apps.
Hope this makes sense
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