Last week Research in Motion announced plans to incorporate applications for the Android mobile operating system (developed by Google) into their Blackberry devices, which run their own, proprietary operating system.
I, for one, think this is an absolutely brilliant idea and something that the mobile phone sector is desperately going to need in years to come.
Having the ability to move applications between devices and operating systems is something that has been missing from the mobile phone sector since applications and mobile computing started to become all the rage for consumers a couple of years ago.
Currently, when a customer moves from one phone to another they basically lose everything that they had stored on their previous device; applications, contacts, notes, whatever. All this information is (usually) stored in special formats that are only readable by devices from the same manufacturer and running the same operating system. So when you change, you have to start all over again.
As we see the market share of smart phones increase (and it will, I don’t think there’s any doubts there), not being able to transfer your data easily from one to the other is going to become and increasingly large problem.
People like simple. People like easy. People like it when things work the way they think they should. And RIMs idea, to allow Android applications to run on their Blackberry OS is a great step towards that goal.
The idea of being able to purchase an Android application once and be able to use it on either an Android phone or a Blackberry is something that I find appealing. It gives me choice. It gives me a greater freedom in my mobile computing life. That is something that I like.
Of course, the only way this would work is if Android device makers reciprocated and allowed compatibility with Blackberry applications. Also if Apple opened up their….nope; that’s never going to happen.