Just this week, Amazon announced that it now offers 240,000 apps and is forging new relationships with more developers every day. In contrast, BlackBerry World only offers 130,000 apps and it’s missing many of the most popular ones out there, including Candy Crush, Netflix, and Pinterest. Given BlackBerry’s ever diminishing grip on the smartphone market, developers aren’t too interested in making the effort to create apps for BB 10.3. As such, BlackBerry users were out of luck when it comes to having access to a plentiful app store. That is, until now.
Although Amazon’s Appstore doesn’t have the largest app ecosystem, it shows signs of rapid growth and promise. While BlackBerry’s app store has languished and stagnated, Amazon’s has tripled in size over the course of a single year. It’s simply easier for developers to tweak their Android apps for Amazon’s forked Fire OS than it is for them to recreate the apps entirely for BB OS.
BlackBerry’s CEO John Chen readily admitted to the Wall Street Journal that he doesn’t want to spend the time or money necessary to build up the company’s app store. Since there was no way the Google Play Store or iOS App Store was going to offer BlackBerry a helping hand, Chen turned to Amazon for a solution. Seeing as Amazon is trying to build up its Appstore and encourage more people to buy its content, striking a deal with BlackBerry made good business sense.
Now that the deal is official, BlackBerry users can download apps from Amazon’s Appstore and Chen says the Appstore will come preloaded on all BlackBerry devices when BB 10.3 arrives.
