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RE: Maybe a bad thing?
by dragos.pop on Fri 25th Mar 2011 07:53 UTC in reply to "Maybe a bad thing?"
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If developers can make their apps run on both Android and Blackberry tablets by targeting only Android, then why target Blackberry?

Yes, same reason why android supports J2ME (3rd party app) and Adobe Flex, but developers still prefer to write android apps.

Actually there more reasons:
1) Games
- Performance not great enough
- They are easy to port using NDK and OpenGL
Can you run android NDK apps?

2) UI
- it will never integrate well into the OS
- for a complex app that uses CPP for business logic, the UI is actually simple to rewrite.

From my point of view this compatibility layer is for the tone of small and stupid apps, not for those killer apps.

A similar thing happened with OS/2. Developers tended to target Windows because the apps would run on both. This eventually meant there would be no killer OS/2 exclusive apps. This was a contributing factor in OS/2's demise.

Is there any reason to think history wouldn't be repeated?

It won't, it's simple:
- There are no killer apps (for what I know) for android or IPhone. Most important apps are on both phones.
- Today's mobile space is not defined by killer apps, but by UI and maybe killer OS features, OS availability...
- BlackBerry already has a killer feature: blackberry connect. You and me might like android's gmail app and (pseudo)push email, but business men, it's all the way blackberry, nothing else they trust. It doesn't even matter the awful browser or the UI...

By the way, blackberry connect will be ported to android. Will this mean the end of blackberry cellphones or the history will repeat itself (it was ported to WinCE, with no market success).

Edited 2011-03-25 07:56 UTC

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