In a bid to reach out to the developer community, BlackBerry has accepted many such apps which were ported from the Android platform. Currently, nearly 20 percent of the apps available for BlackBerry 10 are ported. However, users seem unsatisfied with the quality of such BlackBerry apps.
The problem with porting apps from Android to BlackBerry is that once ported, many features of such apps do not work on the later. As a result, these apps offer a rather poor experience.
Alec Saunders, the head of developer relations at the company, admits the issue. “From a commercial perspective, users hate them. Our partners who have ported apps get dinged for them,” he said.
However, BlackBerry doesn’t mean to rely much on ported apps. Rather, allowing ported apps was simply an incentive which BlackBerry offered to the developers in order to win them over. Yes, this may result in apps of poor quality but it has been successful in perking up the interests of the developer community in BlackBerry.
This is manifest in the fact that a year ago, only 47 percent developers were interested in developing apps for BlackBerry 10. But now, a year ahead, this number has risen up to a whopping 88 percent.
Given this heightened interest of the developers, we can expect that the ported apps will soon form only a tiny portion of the overall BlackBerry 10 apps catalog. And if BlackBerry is able to carry forth this developer interest and turn it into a better apps ecosystem that can compete the likes of App Store and Google Play.
Courtesy: CNET
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