We can add to this the fact that a good number of larger, old school BlackBerry shops developed in-house, "behind the firewall" apps to expose internal systems data on BlackBerry handsets. Each quarter BlackBerry currently adds between 10,000 and 15,000 new apps to the BlackBerry World catalogue just for old school BlackBerry OS 7 devices. What I hadn't realised was how popular the BlackBerry apps ecosystem was before BlackBerry 10. Over the past two years whilst BlackBerry has been rebooting, the company has put a staggering amount of effort into schmoozing developers into developing apps for the platform. BlackBerry provides tools to do this and the process is very easy. The actual process of moving an Android app onto BlackBerry 10 (and PlayBook, incidentally) isn't so much "conversion" as "re-packaging". But it does create a problem for BlackBerry. An app is an app, and as a user if I like an app I'm not sure if I care too much whether it's a full-blown BlackBerry 10 app or an Android app. At the current run rate where they're adding about a thousand apps per day, that suggests about 13,000-odd of the apps in the catalogue are actually Android apps. In fact, as of the time of writing only 17 percent of the catalogue are repackaged Android apps. This is a runtime that allows Android apps to run on BlackBerry 10 as if they're normal application. BlackBerry 10, like PlayBook before it, has an "Android Player". There's also a perception that the catalogue is very "Android heavy". ![]() That catalogue has some problems - most notably that apps are of a certain relatively low quality and utility, and that virtually all of hero apps that contribute significantly to the dominant platforms (iOS and Android) are missing. We know that BlackBerry 10 launched with an BlackBerry World catalogue that was 70,000 apps strong. ![]() Last Wednesday, BlackBerry made the transition from being a company that was developing a new smartphone platform to a company that actually has a smartphone platform out in the market.
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