Thousands of Android Apps now Available on PlayBook
Thousands of Android Apps Available on PlayBook, Says RIMRIM PlayBookResearch In Motion said that "thousands" of Android apps are already in the Android player launched one week ago as part of the PlayBook OS 2.0 update.
The company said that the player could help encourage more native app development on the PlayBook. There are currently 10,000 apps in the BlackBerry App World, including the Android apps, making it smaller than even the fledgling Windows Phone platform, which has 65,000 apps in its store. RIM first announced in March of last year that it would offer software so that PlayBook users could run Android apps.
A lot of developers are looking at adding their apps to the PlayBook Android player as an "on ramp" to the PlayBook, said Martyn Mallick, vice president of global alliances and business development for RIM. It gives them an opportunity to try the platform and see the results in order to inform their decision whether or not to develop natively for it, he said. He said he was surprised at the number of developers who contacted him within the first couple of days of launching the Android player to say that their apps had seen more downloads in a few days on the PlayBook than in the last few months in the Android Market.
