Earlier in the week, BlackBerry announced that they had signed a licensing with Amazon to bring the Amazon Appstore to BlackBerry 10 devices. It would be an understatement to say the opinions are divided on this.
A lot of the information was unclear but our own Rapid John tried to make some sense of it in his article BlackBerry just killed Native BlackBerry app development for consumers.
Earlier today, BlackBerry updated some of their developers on how this licensing agreement may, or may not, affect them.
BlackBerry will continue to support the BlackBerry developer community and will be working with Amazon to help get their apps into Amazon. Enterprise users need apps and there will be continued support for Enterprise developers.
With that in mind, BlackBerry will continue to update all their tooling apps but focused on developing for the enterprise.
There will be two seperate stores. BlackBerry World and the Amazon Appstore.
BlackBerry World will focus on Enterprise and business apps like banking, government, etc. Existing apps will remain and other apps can go in but they won’t be featured in carousels, highlights, etc.
Android apps will still be allowed in BlackBerry World but BlackBerry recommend all non business and consumer apps are published to the Amazon store. This will get your app on other platforms as well.
The plan is simple. If you are looking for a consumer app or a game, go to the Android store. If you are looking for a business focused app go to BlackBerry World.
Bar files cannot be published to the Amazon App Store. Only Android apk files can be published to Amazon.
The Amazon Appstore app will be an Android version. This actually makes sense. Users wanting to use the app are already looking for Android apps and it will also stop different versions running and the risk of being out of sync etc.
BlackBerry will not be curating any content. What’s in the Amazon store will be controlled by Amazon. There will be no special quality assurance to ensure Android apps from the Amazon store will 100% run on BlackBerry devices but BB10 OS 10.3 brings better compatibility in the Android runtime and will continue to be further improved over time.
There will be no access to Google Services as Amazon doesn’t support them.
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