BlackBerry has officially announced that its 10.2 OS update will bring support for Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean apps. This means that the current BlackBerry 10 devices will all be able to run apps compatible with Android Jelly Bean. The first BlackBerry device to bring support for Android apps was the PlayBook tablet, which could run apps developed for Android 2.3.3. These apps have to be specially packaged for the Canadian manufacturer’s platform, but its a lot easier for developers to repackage their apps rather than develop one from the ground up, since that takes a lot of time and resources.
BlackBerry has released new versions of the SDK and Eclipse plugin, as well as 10.2 beta firmware version for developers to test their apps on. It was initially believed that support for Ice Cream Sandwich apps will be added in the next major OS update, some even though that BlackBerry would even totally phase out support for Android apps. Instead they’ve upped it to Jelly Bean. BlackBerry 10.2 OS Alpha was recently leaked, it is expected that the public release of this update is going to take place in the near future.
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