Playbook to officially support Android apps

[poofyhairguy]

This will only work if RIM lets all the junk in. That is what makes the Android Market so awesome- you can get all your questionable programs like emulators from a single source.

If RIM starts trying to weed through the Android ports to just keep the programs that live up to its squeaky clean image, then RIM's store will have the worst of both worlds: iOS's "Apple knows better than you what programs you need" combined with Android's lower level of overall program quality....

 

[Deeko]

When they say android apps, I'm guessing that doesn't include widgets and other services that run in the background.

Yea I was wondering how some of this would work - is it going to handle notifications? Many apps also have a backround service, how will they run? Is the "app player" essentially going to be an Android VM?

Time will tell....

 

[hanoverphist]

*yawn*

Haters gonna... fuck it you know the rest.

 

[Pliablemoose]

We'll see, rim is getting downgraded by several firms today

 

[Deeko]

We'll see, rim is getting downgraded by several firms today

Which has oodles to do with this thread!

 

[KDOG]

That is really good news. I hope they make a 10" variant.

This. And add an mSD card slot in the 10" version while they're at it.... ( to me its a big negative that they didn't include one in version thats being released )

 

[DivideBYZero]

This. And add an mSD card slot in the 10" version while they're at it.... ( to me its a big negative that they didn't include one in version thats being released )

USB host makes this a moot point to a degree.

 

[Alone]

Also, to add even more fuel to anyones fire, there is talk of the USB port being enabled for USB host, so that means you can hook up USB devices such as USB storage, USB SD card readers, etc.

I. Need. UK. Release. Date. :|

Whoa. That would be cool.

Hm..I wonder if it would be possible to stream to the PS3 from the tablet via WiFi? Hm..

 

[Deeko]

USB host makes this a moot point to a degree.

yea, while an actual card slot would be nice, if it has USB storage, it certainly helps - they make those little nub mSD card readers that would do the job. In fact, a lot of retail packaged cards come with those.

 

[DivideBYZero]

Whoa. That would be cool.

Hm..I wonder if it would be possible to stream to the PS3 from the tablet via WiFi? Hm..

Yeah, I'm hoping for this too, from WHS.

 

[tfinch2]

I may be dating myself, but isn't this one of the reasons why IBM OS/2 failed? Instead of writing native apps for OS/2, everyone just continued to write apps using Windows APIs because it worked well. Once Windows 95/Win32 APIs came out and IBM did not support it, that was the end of OS/2.

RIM better stay on the ball keeping this compatibility layer up to date if they want this to work.

 

[pm]

Which has oodles to do with this thread!

I agree. RIMs financial results are barely relevant to this thread... Pliable, if you want to discuss RIM's financials, I'd recommend making another thread.

 

[smartpatrol]

The world asked, and FINALLY someone made a tablet that can run Android apps. . .

Okay sorry I couldn't resist. I guess time will tell whether this will harm or hurt their platform. Worst case scenario, this could mean that the majority of Playbook's "killer apps" are just a subset of Android apps.

 

[Pliablemoose]

I agree. RIMs financial results are barely relevant to this thread... Pliable, if you want to discuss RIM's financials, I'd recommend making another thread.

Noted.

Just to clarify, It appears you'll need to download an "App Player" from the BB market, similar to the way Apple has a virtual machine to run Windows on it's Mac's, it will support apps up to Android 2.3, not Honeycomb tablet apps, you won;t be able to access the Android Market and download apps, RIM will likely have a separate Android Apps store, and it's very likely that the virtual sandbox will have some significant performance issues.

From Batiste's comments yesterday:

First of all, what we announced is Gingerbread. This is not Honeycomb. I don't know what the number of Honeycomb apps is, but it's not very many. Whereas Gingerbread they've got lots of them. You've got the volume of the handset apps, so if you're looking for the tonnage of apps, or some kind of long tail stuff, you've got it.
At the end of the day, people are going to want performance. You're just not going to get things like gaming and multimedia, you're not going to get the speed going through a VM interface. If you want content, or Flash type stuff, or you're looking at AIR-type, evolving web-type assets, that's what you're going to do.
There's no compromise here. You've got the tonnage of apps. And you've got the performance. Do I think the tonnage is overplayed? Yes.
But if you think it's about having a couple hundred thousand apps, there you go.
Do we believe it's about super high performance? Yes. Do we believe it's about full web fidelity? Yes. These are concepts that were really relegated as not technically possible, which we're doing here. This is a no compromise environment.
If you want to work on Android, great. Do we think people will want to migrate web assets? Yes. Do we think they're going to want super high performance native assets with the SDK? Absolutely. You think they're going to want to use their Flash based stuff for an offline Flash/AIR type environment? Yes.
I'm just not interested in these sort of religious application tonnage issues. I really think we put that issue to bed. And if you think the whole world's going to want to develop for Gingerbread, fine. Do I think that's going to happen? Then why is there a different environment for a tablet? And you know about the performance issues and you know about the app volume issues, cause it's tough. And that's why QNX matters.
That's why people are saying, Is this stuff going to go more in the browser and HTML 5 and more native? These are going to be strong trends. But if you want these app players for different VMs -- and don't forget we have 25,000 BlackBerry 6 apps. So, at the end of the day, we believe this is going to be about performance. It's going to be about enterprise greatness. Things like multi-threaded capability, symmetric multiprocessing. We believe it's about an uncompromised web. We believe it's about enterprise security. True multitasking, not with suspension -- and that matters because you're going to want to run these things in the background.
But I'm out of the religious war on tonnage, which I'm delighted.

RIM said that everyone would just run web apps, and when that made customers, investors and analysts unhappy, they came up with this abortion, and they announced it during their quarterly results, that's why I mentioned the haircut RIM's stock price took yesterday, the two do not exist in isolation, they are intertwined.

I've started a RIM death watch thread, and will keep it updated as RIM keeps screwing up...

 

[Deeko]

Just to clarify, It appears you'll need to download an "App Player" from the BB market, similar to the way Apple has a virtual machine to run Windows on it's Mac's, it will support apps up to Android 2.3, not Honeycomb tablet apps, you won;t be able to access the Android Market and download apps, RIM will likely have a separate Android Apps store, and it's very likely that the virtual sandbox will have some significant performance issues.

A lot of assumptions here, some with merit, some without.

Its already been made clear that it won't have direct access to the Android Market - devs will repackage the app, sign it with an App World key, and submit it to the Blackberry App World. Makes perfect sense from a business perspective - that way RIM makes money on the purchases.

As for the 'app player', it is disingenuous to assume it will have horrible performance. Remember, Android is just Java (for the most part anyway). The app player is likely a framework with a Dalvik JVM and wrappers for calls to Android hardware/buttons. Considering that portability is one of the things Java was designed to support, unless they did a really poor job in their Dalvik JVM, there's no reason to assume it will have poor performance. Also remember, Android apps are designed to run on Android hardware, which up until now, was significantly slower than the PlayBook.

The lack of Honeycomb support isn't a huge deal yet - how many honeycomb apps are there anyway? Most Android tablets so far have been sub 3.0, so I doubt app developers are clamoring to make 3.0-exclusive apps. And since the app player is just software, downloadable from the App World, I'm sure they can update it to support the newer versions of the SDK as they come available.

 

[Pliablemoose]

A lot of assumptions here, some with merit, some without.

Its already been made clear that it won't have direct access to the Android Market - devs will repackage the app, sign it with an App World key, and submit it to the Blackberry App World. Makes perfect sense from a business perspective - that way RIM makes money on the purchases.

As for the 'app player', it is disingenuous to assume it will have horrible performance. Remember, Android is just Java (for the most part anyway). The app player is likely a framework with a Dalvik JVM and wrappers for calls to Android hardware/buttons. Considering that portability is one of the things Java was designed to support, unless they did a really poor job in their Dalvik JVM, there's no reason to assume it will have poor performance. Also remember, Android apps are designed to run on Android hardware, which up until now, was significantly slower than the PlayBook.

The lack of Honeycomb support isn't a huge deal yet - how many honeycomb apps are there anyway? Most Android tablets so far have been sub 3.0, so I doubt app developers are clamoring to make 3.0-exclusive apps. And since the app player is just software, downloadable from the App World, I'm sure they can update it to support the newer versions of the SDK as they come available.

Agreed, those are all reasonable assumptions, and to RIM's credit, they were up front with the Android apps, the media played it differently than the way RIM announced it. When I saw the headlines, I assumed it meant that it would natively support Android apps by sideloading them or something.