A little over a year ago, BlackBerry announced that its new BlackBerry 10 platform was home to more than 100,000 applications. To this day, though, one of the chief complaints regarding BB10 is its app selection and quality. Today BlackBerry announced a new plan to try and address that issue.
BlackBerry has revealed that it’s signed a licensing agreement with Amazon to make the Amazon Appstore available to BlackBerry 10 users. This means that more than 200,000 Android apps will be available for direct download, including major names like Groupon, Netflix and Minecraft.
BlackBerry says that the Amazon Appstore will be available to users with the launch of BlackBerry 10.3, which is expected to go down this fall.
BlackBerry 10 users have long been able to sideload Android apps onto their devices, but that process may not be super clear to some regular consumers. This Amazon Appstore agreement could help to alleviate that problem, making it easy for every BB10 user to install Android apps on their device. Of course, the fact that they’re Android apps means that they may not fully take advantage of BB10’s feature set like native apps do, but I’m sure some folks will just be happy with having a wider selection of easily-installable apps.
Do you think that this is a smart move by BlackBerry?
