>This is the real challenge RIM faces -- in an ecosystem-based market people's buying decisions are driven as much by the health of the overall ecosystem as by the merits of an individual product within it.
Doesn't BB10 run Android apps? It may not run them well, but it's probably a good start before developers start writing native BB10 apps.
On the other hand the danger is that devs rely on the Android compatibility layer and ignore the native APIs like it happened with OS/2 and Windows/DOS compatibility.
Android apps need to be repackaged in order to run on a BlackBerry device, however the process (at least for me with 4 apps) is pretty painless. My four apps took about half a day. Add in the time it took to collect images and metadata and it took all of 7 hours work to prepare and submit them.
BB10 does indeed have an Android Player and in my experience it works pretty well. I played with it earlier in the year and while it did not support apps that made JNI calls at that time, it worked pretty well for vanilla Android applications. I assume JNI support will be added or perhaps has already been added since it's been while since I last looked at it.
I don't see why people would complain about no backwards compatibility with BB7. BB7 is legacy OS and almost a relic of another era compared to Android, iOS and QNX in BB10. If you are going to support apps for one other OS, Android is a much better target due to the sheer amount of apps out there.
If you're a corporate who've invested significantly in training, business specific software, support infrastructure and so on for a particular platform to be told you've got to start over is a massive deal and you care a whole load that your massive investment is largely for nothing.
Backward compatibility would have allowed many corporates (a significant market for RIM) to maintain that investment and if they could do that that would be a major reason to stick with RIM. The fact that RIM have cut them loose effectively means they have to start over and makes RIMs incumbency effectively worthless when it comes to business retention.
Doesn't BB10 run Android apps? It may not run them well, but it's probably a good start before developers start writing native BB10 apps.
On the other hand the danger is that devs rely on the Android compatibility layer and ignore the native APIs like it happened with OS/2 and Windows/DOS compatibility.