BlackBerry Devices May Run Android Apps 158
crankyspice writes "RIM is allegedly prepping the QNX-based operating system running their forthcoming PlayBook tablet to run Android applications, according to a Bloomberg article. As RIM has stated that the QNX platform will run at least some of its upcoming smartphones as well, this could cinch Android's status as the lingua franca of smartphone application environments, especially with BlackBerry's current market leadership and Android's explosive marketshare growth."
emulate (Score:2, Insightful)
if you cannot beat them - emulate them
Re:what i'd like (Score:4, Insightful)
Merely getting Dalvik, or a JVM tweaked enough to act like it, up and running on QNX would take work; but wouldn't present fundamental challenges. Nor, unless you really screwed it up, would it be more dangerous than the potentially-untrusted java applications you can run on Blackberries.
However, that also wouldn't be too terribly useful. A fair number of phone applications depend, for their usefulness, on access to some amount of the outside world. Having a completely separate address book on the blackberry side and the "android" side would get really old, really fast. On the other hand, Mr. Corporate IT, MCSE, is going to be very, very unhappy if he learns that some skeezy android application is siphoning off the internal company directory to some offshore FTP site because RIM has provided the android environment with a link to the Blackberry side.
That seems like it will be the really tricky bit(both in terms of security, and in terms of user experience elegance). In principle, the technical difficulty of dumping a tame android-compatible environment in all sorts of places isn't that high. Making it worth using, and making sure that it plays nicely with the host environment, requires more finesse....
Re:Very, very stupid idea (Score:5, Insightful)
RIM's core market are business users. This market is safe.
No, its not safe.
Android is going after business as well. (Apple pretends to, but then insists you install a music player to manage a phone).
There isn't a single mainstream business platform that Android can't interact with, securely. Sometimes with built in apps, in other cases third party apps are better. Look at TouchDown some time as merely one example.
Rim was/is the leader in this, but they can't rest on their laurels.
RIM has it backwards (Score:2, Insightful)
We're going to be dumping our BlackBerrys and our BES CALs because the Android and IOS devices can do almost as much, with far less security. The reality is that the big bosses want the latest high-tech jewelry, and the BB is The Old Stuff.
But RIM is fixated on selling the hardware of it's BB phone. The PlayBook is a large screen and keyboard for the BB phone. Your corporate email is still kept in the BB phone - not the PlayBook. I've got bad news for you RIM: no-one wants to wear two phones, one for work and one for personal. Even though the personal phones aren't nearly as good as the BB from a security standpoint, they are good enough. And frankly they are better at email/calendar/PIM/chat. Bye bye BB. And with that, I don't need a PlayBook either.
As an admin who has the duty to protect our information assets, I would far prefer to have those assets protected by our BES. It's an established solution and works well.
Instead of trying to make the PlayBook drag the BB along as the second phone (three devices total (are you serious RIM???)), they should be trying to give me the protection of the BES in my IOS or Android device. One device plus high security - that is an easy sell. At least this way they could keep that BES CALs revenue coming in.
Another thing wrong with switching over to personal phones is the mixing of personal data with the corporate data. But it will happen because the personal phone apps see integration as a good thing - it increases the data mining potential.
RIM is trying to make the walled garden larger by importing Android apps. I would far far prefer that my IOS or Android be able to launch the tiny walled (fortified with extreme prejudice) garden of my corporate data protected by the BES.
Re:So why run QNX? (Score:2, Insightful)
QNX is one of the few systems in the world that is aged and reliable. Enough to run industrial systems. Android is a few decades behind still.