BlackBerry World to Allow Android Apps

BlackBerry is a company in the middle of some major transition. After an initial money-injecting purchase of the smartphone company was cancelled, they installed a new CEO and the new man in charge put forth a new vision for the company, which has struggled to stay relevant as iOS and Android devices continue to take over the mobile market. As a way to stay in the minds of current and potential customers, BlackBerry is trying something different.
It was announced that BlackBerry phones will begin to support Android apps, a move that could help the beleaguered company. The upcoming 10.2.1 update for Blackberry hardware will also have other things that will be included within the additions for Blackberry users. "The Android Runtime team has been hard at work this year, bringing many new improvements to the runtime, such as support for Jelly Bean 4.2.2, hardware acceleration and performance updates," said Matt on the BlackBerry Developer Blog. "The team is continuing the quest to improve the overall compatibility of the runtime and add support for many highly requested features and APIs." Here is everything that will be included in the update.
 Android Native Support: Android apps that use shared libraries written in native-code, such as C and C , will now be supported on BlackBerry 10 OS. Support is limited to the recommended system headers and APIs as documented by Google. Headers and APIs outside this scope may not function correctly.

Bluetooth: Android applications using Android Bluetooth APIs will now work on BlackBerry 10 devices. Bluetooth Low Energy for Android is planned to be supported in a future OS release. As a reminder, Bluetooth LE is supported in the BlackBerry 10 Native/Cascades SDK.

MapView v1: Applications that use MapView from Google Maps v1 API are now supported using OpenStreetMaps. Support for MapView v2 API is being planned for a future release.

- Share Framework: Android applications that register with the share framework in Android will now also appear as share targets on the BlackBerry 10 share menu.

- Spellcheck: Applications that use text input can now leverage support for spell checking and correction, and the ability to add words to the BlackBerry 10 dictionary.

New BlackBerry CEO John Chen wrote in November that the company is still "committed to delivering high quality products and services to the millions people who rely on us globally" but the problem lies with the fact that no one really takes the BlackBerry brand seriously. BlackBerry, once a company that shipped 51.5 million units in 2011, is predicted by many to run through it $2 billion cash reserves within 18 months. In 2009, BlackBerry owned approximately 50 percent of the handset market but now are struggling against the likes of Apple and Android products. Heins' reign as CEO saw the launch of the newest BlackBerry phones which included the BlackBerry Z10, which lost the company close to $1 billion due to poor sales.

This is the second change for BlackBerry in last few months as in September BlackBerry made their BBM messenger service available for iPhones and Android devices.