Of the reported 100,000 BlackBerry 10 apps that populate the BlackBerry World storefront, approximately one out of five of those are ported-over Android apps.
Speaking with the Wall Street Journal’s All Things D, Martyn Mallick, BlackBerry’s vice president for global alliances and business development, said the company uses an emulator that allows Android apps to more easily run on BlackBerry’s new mobile platform.
Mallick admitted that the emulator is a shortcut but the long-term goal is to get developers interested in creating native apps for the fledging operating system.
Prior to its U.S. launch last week, BlackBerry faced uncertainty as to how its mobile app store would stack up with Apple and Google’s existing ecosystems. Big names like Netflix indicated they had no plans to build BlackBerry 10 apps. But still some users from those ecosystems are jumping ship for BB 10.
According to some Boy Genius Report findings, 50 percent of those who purchased a Z10 in Canada migrated from Android and iOS, with a third of those who purchased the device in the United Kingdom came from those platforms.
The once-mighty OEM has fallen on hard times. Gartner saw BlackBerry’s market share fell 33 percent last year, leaving BlackBerry with only 3.3 percent of smartphone sales by operating system globally.
Filed Under: Devices
