Advertisment

'Offering PlayBook to Android will confuse developers'

author-image
CIOL Bureau
Updated On
New Update

BANGALORE, INDIA: Research In Motion (RIM) has officially announced that its upcoming tablet, the PlayBook, will run BlackBerry Java as well as Android apps.

Advertisment

In its decision to offer multi-runtime support for its BlackBerry PlayBook tablet is understandable but potentially risky, said Tony Cripps, principal analyst at Ovum.

Also read: The rise of the Android

He added,"Tapping into the developer communities surrounding multiple popular platforms - such as Android, Adobe Flash (previously announced), AirPlay and Unity games developers, C/C++ developers and its own BlackBerry smartphone developer community - will undoubtedly help expose RIM's PlayBook to a far larger addressable market of application developers."

Advertisment

But the myriad of options now available also runs the risk of confusing those same developers. This was previously the case for Nokia, which at one time was supporting upwards of 10 programming environments for its mobile developers, he added.

Apple, in comparison, has made a virtue of keeping its developer options simple - HTML and Objective C/Cocoa Touch - being effectively the only choices. "However, this approach has clearly also been self-serving as it reinforces Apple's control over the distribution channel for iOS apps, namely the App Store,' added Cripps.

Also read: 55 pc developers prefer to develop Android-based apps

He further added that, RIM's dilemma is different. The success of mobile devices is increasingly coming to be dictated as much by the availability (or promise of availability) of desirable apps and content as it is by the quality of the devices themselves.

While RIM's ecosystem building efforts have been laudable, and reasonably effective, it is nonetheless in danger of being relegated to a secondary player in the minds of developers, concluded cripps.

tech-news