Natively-built flavors of these apps might also be released

Mar 27, 2013 12:21 GMT  ·  By

Several days ago, Canadian mobile phone maker BlackBerry announced that its mobile app storefront had reached a new milestone, now being able to provide users with access to over 100,000 applications.

Building a strong ecosystem for the mobile platform is a key focus for the company, as it is expected to help it gain some more share in a market dominated by Android and iOS.

However, it seems that many of the aforementioned thousands of applications actually come from Google’s Android OS, and that they are not native BlackBerry 10 apps.

As AllThingsD notes in a recent article, the amount stretches up to 20 percent of the total number of apps available for the new platform.

The info comes from Martyn Mallick, BlackBerry’s vice president for global alliances and business development, it seems, who sees this as a good thing, since it increases the software count for the OS.

“We give them a very nice on-ramp to get onto the platform. Our users deserve to have great content. If that is the fastest way we can get some of that content, that’s great,” Mallick reportedly said.

However, it seems that many of those developers who have already ported their apps to BlackBerry 10 (courtesy of an emulation engine that offers support for Android software) are also interested in building native apps for the platform.

BlackBerry 10 comes with its own set of unique features, and ported applications cannot tap into all of them, while those built using the development tools that BlackBerry has pushed out can.

The first handset to run under the OS has been on shelves since late January, namely BlackBerry Z10, and is said to have enjoyed pretty decent sales until now.

Soon, a second such device will hit the market, namely BlackBerry Q10, which adds a QWERTY keyboard to the touchscreen display.

However, BlackBerry has already upgraded the BlackBerry 10 SDK so as to provide support for the new device, after starting to offer developer handsets with physical keyboards a few months ago.