July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Smartphone ecosystems live and die by apps, and BlackBerry wants to make sure its latest one survives.

At its developer event in Amsterdam today, the company announced that it plans to update the BlackBerry 10′s Android runtime to support Jelly Bean apps, Engadget reports.

That’s big news, seeing as how the BlackBerry 10 Android runtime is still running Android 2.3 Gingerbread, which is at this point two years old.

In non-l33t speak, with the update developers can easily port their Jelly Bean-based Android apps to BlackBerry 10. This means more apps, more revenue, and potentially, fewer people running away from BlackBerry 10 because of an undeveloped app ecosystem.

So far, the only problem with the update is that BlackBerry hasn’t pegged an arrival for it. That’s usually not a great sign, but we’ll know sooner or later when BlackBerry plans to release it.