Recently, BlackBerry has courted headlines more often for its Android hardware offerings like the BlackBerry PRIV and the BlackBerry DTEK50. However, this is a company who in the grand scale of things is far more successful for its software aspects than anything else. As well as migrating over to the Android operating system, the company has also converted some of its software products over to Android apps too. The latest of which has now been announced today.
BlackBerry has confirmed the arrival of a number of new apps for Android, some of which will be very familiar to those who had been a BlackBerry 10 customer before. The new apps come as part of the BlackBerry Hub+ suite and look to unify much of the user’s communications. On offer as part of the BlackBerry Hub is an inbox which groups together all of your communications, as well as a calendar app, a password manager app and more. When used together, the suite is not only designed to be more secure, but all more manageable with all of your communication avenues brought together in one manageable stream.
The new Android BlackBerry Hub+ suite is available starting today from the Google Play Store. You can download the initial BlackBerry Hub+ Services app through the link below and once installed and running, simply click on “Apps by BlackBerry” to retrieve the rest of the suite. Alternatively, each app will be available to download on its own merit from the Google Play Store over the course of today. So if you just want the calendar app, then you can download just that app. The app suite will first download as part of a 30-day trial and once the trial has ended, interested users can either pay $0.99 to retain the use of the suite, or make use of an ad-supported version for free. At the moment, the only caveat is that the app suite is currently only supported by devices running Android 6.0 (Marshmallow). BlackBerry has confirmed that they are working on increasing support for devices running Android 5.0 (Lollipop), but as it stands, devices do need to be running Marshmallow, at a minimum.
