SideLoad Apps with Android App Player on Blackberry Playbook OS

You have probably read somewhere that it is possible to ‘sideload’ android apps on blackberry’s newest devices, and run them on the blackberry OS. I remember when the Blackberry playbook OS 2.0 was released back in 2012, people were disappointed to discover that there was no app icon to launch the Android player.

The Android player on Blackberry is not actually an app per se, but can be best described as an emulator that helps execute these android apps once they are launched.
You can’t really tell if an app is a repackaged Android app as these apps co-exist with other blackberry apps in the App World repository. The only way to find out is to download and run the app. If it loads in a different manner to normal blackberry apps, then it is a repackaged Android app. The Android app player is automatically launched when an Android app is executed and is associated with the screen below where it says “Initializing, Please wait…”

However, when one app has loaded, if you swipe down to reveal the options for that app, you will also notice a bar at the bottom of the screen displaying six most recently loaded android apps, which you can select to load if you want to. You can also set this bar to always display on the Android App Player screen without having to swipe down everytime.