[QuantumQnx]

Like everyone else, I am loving BB 10.2. The most noticeable change imo is the addition of 4.2 jellybean android. I am stunned how much better android apps run than previous iterations. Android apps on the PlayBook was absolutely terrible. Overtime BB has continually improved gingerbread Android support. I even convinced my friend to add his specialty app, Artemis Director's Viewfinder to appworld: BlackBerry World - Artemis Director's Viewfinder (we are currently working on adding jellybean upgrade) Sales have been pretty good considering it is an android port. Anyways, I like many others wondered if it was even worth the time to support android. It was clunky, confusing to consumers and it discouraged native app development. Now that we finally have jelly bean support, I just can't believe how well android apps run. If BB had brought 4.2 support from the get go, maybe we could have snagged some more of the big name app holdouts, whose lack of support just kills BB in the view of consumers and reviewers.

I am not that much of a techie but the main difference seems to be hardware acceleration. Jelly bean apps seem to run with almost no lag, whereas gingerbread apps are brutally slow and clunky. Now that 10.2 seems to have the ability of running almost any jelly bean android app so well - why did it take BB so long to upgrade from ancient gingerbread? Again, I am not a OS programmer but Android is opensource and QNX is supposedly capable of running almost any software. Why didn't BB make this a priority? We should have had jelly bean support on launch day!

[howarmat]

nope i dont think it would matter at all. I am not seeing enough change from the old to the new runtime to make a difference in sales. There is still many APIs that the ports dont have access to and still many key apps that even when ported dont work right on the 4.2.2 runtime. Xachas debug workaround I think makes the biggest difference and that is a step past sideloading as it is.

[QuantumQnx]

nope i dont think it would matter at all. I am not seeing enough change from the old to the new runtime to make a difference in sales. There is still many APIs that the ports dont have access to and still many key apps that even when ported dont work right on the 4.2.2 runtime. Xachas debug workaround I think makes the biggest difference and that is a step past sideloading as it is.

If 4.2.2 doesn't support all the APIs, why doesn't BlackBerry release a runtime that does support all of the APIs. Is there a technical reason for this or it is just BlackBerry protecting their business interests? I understand they have to license Google maps but are there actually any legitimate reasons?

Posted via CB10

[howarmat]

If 4.2.2 doesn't support all the APIs, why doesn't BlackBerry release a runtime that does support all of the APIs. Is there a technical reason for this or it is just BlackBerry protecting their business interests? I understand they have to license Google maps but are there actually any legitimate reasons?

Posted via CB10

i think its a bit of both. Google isnt going to give BB acess to using everything and BB isnt going to allow android devs acess to everything since it leaves little incentive to do native apps.