Starting this fall, phones running the BlackBerry 10 OS will come pre-loaded with the Amazon Appstore for Android, giving users of its phones instant access to Amazon's library of games and apps.
Though the company once courted game developers, BlackBerry is now shifting its focus away from improving its own app development ecosystem in favor of a readymade solution to its problems. Starting this fall, The Wall Street Journal reports, phones running the BlackBerry 10 OS will come pre-loaded with the Amazon Appstore for Android, giving users of its phones instant access to Amazon's library of games and apps. BlackBerry's own app store will continue to function alongside Amazon's. This means that game developers may not have to tweak their apps to run on BlackBerry devices at all, moving forward -- as long as they sign up with Amazon. Currently, the company offers an Android Toolkit for getting Android apps running on BlackBerry. Though it hoped to gain consumer market share with its BlackBerry 10 phones, the company abandoned that plan after sluggish sales and now hopes to re-entrench as a popular choice for the workplace. "Given I want to financially turn around the company and focus on the enterprise space, this is perfect for us," CEO John Chen told The Wall Street Journal, in reference to the Amazon deal.
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