AppWorld and Android Apps. Quantity but little Quality.

Unfortunately it seems like the majority of Apps being converted and horrible apps. Sorry if I offend someone, I didn't say all, I said the Majority.

What is going on? RIM has opened a flood gate of garbage!

Can the Android Player not run big name games or quality apps? What the heck is the point? It becomes counter productive to bury quality native apps in an AppWorld full of Androids junk.

My suggestion would be to keep the Android Apps in a different market place. Giving priority to loyal native developers.

BlackBerry AppWorld
Android AppWorld

I need a way of avoiding this junk, this is the only idea I've come up with, any thoughts?

same is with native apps. there are many bad ones too. public wants to hear numbers. this is why ithings are so popular. most of the ipod apps must be garbage but at least there is 500,000 of them. same is with pb now. on the bright side there are many good, quality android apps as well. I do agree with you that qnx apps should be given spotlight priority.

Sent from my BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps

From what I read, the intent seems to be that you shouldn't really notice a difference and therefore they don't differentiate native and android apps in appworld. Of course anyone who has actually used it knows; since you can only run one app at a time, and the interfaces don't match the native apps and are usually crap..they stand out. So from a user perspective I agree, I'd like them to be differentiated somehow with preference given to native apps. It would be nice to have a "app type" field to sort/filter on.

I have complained on forums before that Handster seems to be the bulk of the crap additions. I don't know what their story is, but a majority of the crappy android apps were submitted by them. So I'd also love to be able to search for "some app that does X and is not submitted by Handster" :)

When RIM had their "create an app within this time period and get a free PlayBook" promotion, they created an incentive for developers to build and submit an app with as small a time investment as possible. That's not conducive to quality.

On the other hand, if RIM's primary objective here was to be able to quote something along the lines of "50,000 apps in our App World!", that goal was likely met.

I can't see how they can be very good if all they do is port just like I could. I would think anyone that cares would spend a little time making it fit better.

For me the main benefit of OS 2 was that some quality apps that I want and that are on Android would now be on playbook. Unfortunately only one of many has both been converted and work. Some like Repligo have been converted but crash. Schwab, Thinkorswim (TD Ameritrade), Interactive Brokers, all have Android versions of their trading software. Two of them have BB handset applications. BUT their Android apps have not been converted despite my numerous requests.

RIM needs to convert and test these in house along with all the other good Android apps.

Dunno what you're talking about, but I have a bunch of quality android apps.

qPDF, Ghost Commander, Xbox live and PSN Manager just off the top of my head.

Originally Posted by bitek

same is with native apps. there are many bad ones too. public wants to hear numbers. this is why ithings are so popular. most of the ipod apps must be garbage but at least there is 500,000 of them. same is with pb now. on the bright side there are many good, quality android apps as well. I do agree with you that qnx apps should be given spotlight priority.

Sent from my BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps

I do not know what a "qnx" app is. Apps that run in the Android player are every bit as much "PlayBook" apps as are apps like mine that run in the Adobe Air Runtime. Aside from these minor quibbles, I do agree with the general tenor of your post. The user experience is different with respect to Android-based apps because they must run in their own container that acts as a virtual Android device within the PlayBook device. This fact does affect usability and so Android-based apps should be identified as such so that consumers can make informed decisions.

Originally Posted by jgrobertson

RIM needs to convert and test these in house along with all the other good Android apps.

Developers (not RIM) must convert their Android apps and submit them to App World for approval. RIM can encourage them to do so, but they cannot do the job themselves because they do not own the intellectual rights to the software.

we cant expect every android app to be great or useful. it may not be useful to you, but useful to somebody else. i have speedometer, photo editor ,xbox ps3 manager, snake hd, pool break all android apps. you can argue that some of this apps have native ones, but still, there are android apps that are actually good.

Originally Posted by Concession

Dunno what you're talking about, but I have a bunch of quality android apps.

qPDF, Ghost Commander, Xbox live and PSN Manager just off the top of my head.

qPDF took 5 x as long to open in comparison to native Adobe Reader. Mostly no doubt to the fact its an Android App and it has to load the Player. A very laggy user experience.

The first thing I tried was their email feature, it loads the Native client (Wow, this might work), but it doesn't attach the document. Go figure.

Again, it's not all, but the majority is just taking up space and giving a substandard experience.

I don't think RIM's intention with the app creation giveaway was to boost app numbers although that is an obvious side-effect, but rather, to have these developers see how easy it was to port it to PlayBook, get a free PlayBook, potentially like and begin to develop some quality applications for it and move away from Android.

So I think while yes we saw a massive influx and continue to do so of more or less rather garbage apps, I think the real kicker is when we find these Android devs begin releasing Native apps.


I do hope as applications do get updated and become native they transfer over from Android to SDK. It would be stupid if they left it as two copies of the same App with one being android and the other being native.