I’ve been an Android user for many years, but only recently dabbled with a few alternative app stores to Google Play.
I now have Amazon’s app store and the F-Droid open source app store running on my Android device.
Even more recently I acquired a BlackBerry Z30 device running BlackBerry 10 OS. After hearing Amazon’s app store will be shipping by default with the next version of BlackBerry 10, v10.3, I decided to fire it up now to see what happens. I also did some searching to see if was possible to run the F-Droid app store on BB10 and there’s not much of a word of that combination on the Internet. Voila! It was as easy as pointing the browser to both those stores’ Web sites, downloading the app store .apk package and touching to install them.
I now have both the F-Droid and Amazon app stores running on both Android and BlackBerry 10 (10.2.1).
YAMMV
That said, while the two app stores work fine and download apps on the BlackBerry device fine, it’s a big Your App Mileage May Vary as to how many of the apps actually run on the QNX-based OS. In my (limited) experience it’s about 50-50. As in 50% work fine and the other 50% start and then crash immediately.
I hope the main ones I use, like the Sparse RSS reader, work across both devices so I have a reasonably standards-based approach to personal mobility, and can avoid being at the helm of one walled garden.
