One major problem for BlackBerry over the past several years has been the huge app gap that its own BlackBerry World app store faces with Google Play and the iTunes App Store. Although some BlackBerry diehards have bravely insisted that BlackBerry World’s app selection is just fine to fit their needs, in the real world people want to have a big range of quality applications to choose from.
With this in mind, BlackBerry has made a deal with Amazon that will finally, at long last, give BlackBerry fans some of the apps that they’ve been pining for. BlackBerry announced on Wednesday that it’s signed “a licensing agreement for the Amazon Appstore to bring more than 200,000 Android apps to you this fall when the BlackBerry 10.3 operating system launches.” This means that BlackBerry fans will be able to directly download Groupon, Netflix, Pinterest, Candy Crush Saga, Minecraft and many others for the first time ever this fall.
Just because BlackBerry devices will have access to Android apps through Amazon, however, doesn’t mean that BlackBerry is giving up on fostering its own homegrown app development. BlackBerry says that BlackBerry 10.3 devices will come with both the Amazon Appstore and BlackBerry World, which means that BlackBerry users will still be able to download the 48,000 spam apps that are produced by one company.
