ORLANDO—In a panel at BlackBerry World today, RIM execs gave some more details about how Android and BlackBerry Java apps would run on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, while promoting RIM's WebWorks SDK as seemingly the primary way of programming for the device.
RIM's "Android Player" simulates a Gingerbread (Android 2.3) smartphone and will let Android apps access the phone's sensors, multimedia components and the native file system, said Chris Smith, senior director for the BlackBerry developer platform at RIM.
The Android Player may get an upgrade after it launches this summer to support Honeycomb tablet apps, other RIM staff at BlackBerry World said, but that's dependent on Google making Honeycomb open source, which the company hasn't done yet.
Android developers will have to repackage their apps as a "bar" file rather than in the standard Android "apk" format, but RIM will make that easy with an extension to the existing Android development kit, execs said. That doesn't necessarily involve recompiling—RIM demoed Android apps on a Playbook without access to those apps' source code. Developers will then submit their apps to BlackBerry App World for approval.
Some "service APIs" may be missing, Smith warned, although Google ads appeared to work in the Android apps I saw.
Anyway, Smith said he sees the Android SDK as a transitional way for Android developers to get their feet wet on the PlayBook platform. RIM followed the same strategy successfully in the past by helping Symbian developers transition over to writing for BlackBerry phones years ago, he said.
Smith's real enthusiasm, though, appeared to be for the PlayBook's "WebWorks" SDK, which can be used to create local Web apps with access to hardware features. Developers will find that WebWorks apps run without the usual performance penalty of running an app in a browser, Smith said, although high-end games will still need to be coded in the upcoming native SDK.
"We have the WebKit engine deeply integrated at the core of the kernel, and we have it tuned to execute as fast as possible," he said.
With so many SDKs—Android, Java, WebWorks, Adobe Air, Flash and the native one—it could be hard to provide a consistent user experience. For now, RIM is erring on the side of letting developers do whatever they want, to get developers enthused about the platform. But in the future, the company may provide more guidelines, as well as controls and chunks of code created by its user-interface specialists TAT, Smith said.
"We do believe that there needs to be a consistency in terms of that experience ... and we're still figuring out exactly how we're going to approach this," he said.