How to Install Android Apps on Your BlackBerry 10

December 31, 2013

Updated October 2026: This post has been expanded from its original 2013 version with the full history of how Android apps came to BlackBerry 10, how the sideloading process worked, the 2014 Amazon Appstore deal, and what became of the platform. It is a historical account; details describe the time it covers, not today.

A BlackBerry Q10 smartphone with a physical keyboard

When this post first appeared in 2013, its promise was simple: you could get Android apps running on a BlackBerry Z10 or Q10 in minutes by installing files other people had converted and shared. For BlackBerry owners that year, that promise mattered. The phones were well built and the operating system was fast, but BlackBerry's own app store was thin compared with what Android and the iPhone offered. Borrowing from Android was how many people filled the gaps.

This is a historical look at how that worked. BlackBerry 10 is no longer a supported platform, so none of this is advice to go and do today. Instead it is the story of an unusual engineering decision, how enthusiasts pushed it further than BlackBerry first intended, and how the whole effort ended.

Why BlackBerry put Android inside its phones

BlackBerry 10, launched on January 30, 2013 along with the Z10 and Q10, was a fresh start built on QNX, a Unix-like system BlackBerry had acquired. The company had rewritten its phone software but faced a hard problem: developers were slow to build apps for a brand-new platform with a small user base. BlackBerry's answer was to include an Android runtime, a compatibility layer that let the phone run apps written for Android inside its own operating system.

The idea was not new in 2013. BlackBerry had first shipped an Android App Player in PlayBook OS 2.0 for its tablet in February 2012. With BlackBerry 10, the runtime moved to the phones. The catch, at launch, was that an Android app could not simply be dropped onto the phone. Developers were expected to repackage their Android apps into BlackBerry's own format and submit them to BlackBerry World, the official store. Many never bothered. That gap is what the enthusiast community set out to close.

How sideloading worked in 2013

The workaround rested on two facts. First, an Android app ships as a file called an APK. Second, BlackBerry apps shipped as a file called a BAR. Tools existed to convert a signed APK into a BAR that the phone would accept, and BlackBerry's developer tools allowed BAR files to be installed over the network when the phone was in developer mode. "Sideloading" simply meant installing an app this way, outside the official store.

The process that guides like this one described generally went as follows:

  1. Get a BAR file. People either converted an APK themselves using an online converter, or downloaded a BAR that someone else had already converted and shared on community sites.
  2. Turn on development mode on the phone, under its security settings, and set a device password. This is what allowed an app to be installed from outside BlackBerry World.
  3. Connect a computer and the phone to the same network, and use a helper tool, such as a Chrome browser extension originally made for the PlayBook, to reach the phone at its network address.
  4. Send the BAR file to the phone through that tool, typically by dragging it in, and wait for a success message.

It worked, but it was fiddly, and results were hit and miss. Not every Android app ran, and the ones that did sometimes behaved oddly, because the runtime only emulated part of Android and left out some services apps expected. In particular, Google's own Play Store and Play Services were not present, so apps that depended on them tended to fail.

The runtime got much better, fast

BlackBerry kept improving the Android layer across 2013. The version shipped with BlackBerry 10 early in the year supported apps built for older Android releases. The 10.2 update brought hardware acceleration, which made Android apps run closer to native speed. The big step came with BlackBerry 10.2.1, which reached devices in late January 2014. It was based on a slimmed-down version of Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean and, crucially, it let users install APK files directly, without converting them to BAR first.

That change quietly transformed the experience. Instead of hunting for a converted BAR, a user could download an APK, including from a third-party Android store, and install it much like on an Android phone. The 10.2.1 release also added support for Android apps that used native code libraries, Android Bluetooth features and Android's built-in sharing. BlackBerry was candid, though, that it had no plans to support the Google Play Store or Google Play Services, which remained the main limitation.

Android on BlackBerry: how support grew
  1. February 2012
    PlayBook OS 2.0 adds an Android App Player to BlackBerry's tablet.
  2. January 30, 2013
    BlackBerry 10 launches with an Android runtime; apps must be repackaged as BAR files.
  3. October 2013
    BlackBerry 10.2 adds hardware acceleration, speeding up Android apps.
  4. Late January 2014
    BlackBerry 10.2.1 (Android 4.2.2 base) allows installing APK files directly.
  5. June 2014
    BlackBerry announces the Amazon Appstore will ship with BlackBerry 10.3.
  6. Fall 2014
    BlackBerry 10.3 arrives with the Amazon Appstore built in.
Sources: Pocketables, Telecompaper, The Register, CrackBerry, Liliputing, TechCrunch.

Amazon makes it official in 2014

The sideloading era effectively ended because BlackBerry replaced it with something official. On June 18, 2014, BlackBerry announced a partnership with Amazon to bundle the Amazon Appstore with the upcoming BlackBerry 10.3 software, which shipped that fall. The Amazon Appstore ran as a native BlackBerry app with a simple interface, and it meant users no longer needed developer mode, a browser extension or a converted file. At the time Amazon's store was reported to carry more than 200,000 apps, including well-known titles the platform had lacked.

For most users this was the point. The clever sideloading tricks of 2013 had been a stopgap. By making a mainstream Android app store a built-in feature, BlackBerry turned a community workaround into a supported product feature, at the cost of admitting how much its own ecosystem depended on Android apps.

How much did the app gap really close?

BlackBerry's own numbers tell part of the story. The company reported about 70,000 apps in BlackBerry World at the BlackBerry 10 launch, and said it had passed 120,000 by its mid-2013 developer conference. Those were real gains, but they were still far short of the hundreds of thousands of apps on Android and iOS. Pulling in Android apps, first by sideloading and then through Amazon's store with its 200,000-plus titles, was how BlackBerry tried to close a gap its own store never could.

What happened to BlackBerry 10

Even a working Android app strategy could not reverse BlackBerry's decline in a market dominated by Android phones and the iPhone. The company shipped a series of BlackBerry 10 devices, the Z10, Q10, Q5, Z30, Z3, Passport, Classic and finally the Leap in 2015, but sales stayed modest.

In October 2015, BlackBerry announced it would stop adding new developer tools and APIs to BlackBerry 10 and focus future updates on security. In the same breath it introduced the BlackBerry Priv, its first phone that ran Android itself rather than merely borrowing its apps. That was the real turning point: rather than run Android apps inside its own system, BlackBerry switched to Android as the system. The company stopped designing its own phones in 2016 and licensed the brand to TCL, which built Android-powered BlackBerry handsets until it stopped in August 2020.

BlackBerry 10 itself was wound down. BlackBerry declared the operating system end-of-life, and on January 4, 2022, it shut off the infrastructure that older BlackBerry devices relied on, meaning BlackBerry 10, BlackBerry OS 7.1 and earlier, and PlayBook OS could no longer reliably handle calls, messages, data or even emergency calls. The phones that once borrowed Android apps became, in a practical sense, offline devices.

What the BlackBerry 10 experiment is worth remembering for

  • A compatibility layer buys time, not loyalty. Running another platform's apps kept BlackBerry 10 usable, but it also signaled that the native ecosystem was not enough on its own.
  • Enthusiast workarounds can become product features. Community sideloading showed real demand, and BlackBerry eventually met it officially with the Amazon Appstore.
  • Missing platform services matter. The absence of Google Play Services, not raw app compatibility, was what broke many apps, a reminder that an app is more than its code file.
  • Plan for the end of service. The 2022 shutdown is a clear case of why depending on a single vendor's servers carries long-term risk once that vendor moves on.

The bottom line

In 2013, installing Android apps on a BlackBerry Z10 or Q10 was a hands-on process of converting files and sideloading them in developer mode. Within a year BlackBerry had made it far easier, first by allowing direct APK installs in version 10.2.1 and then by bundling the Amazon Appstore in 10.3. It was a genuinely clever way to prop up a struggling platform, and for a while it worked. But it could not change the market, and BlackBerry's own pivot to building Android phones, followed by the 2022 end of service, closed the chapter for good.

Sources

Top image: "Blackberry Q10 smartphone" by Kārlis Dambrāns, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (resized). Charts by Thank You Robot.

Perry Toone

Posted by Perry Toone

Perry, the founder of Thexyz and Curious Penguins, is an open water swimmer and an open-source software enthusiast. He develops privacy-respecting software, fuelled by a passion for digital privacy and high security standards.

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