Smartphone maker partners with top brands for new apps

CEBU, Philippines - The Ontario-based smartphone company introduced its strong partnership with a line-up of top brands building applications that will be offered for BlackBerry 10 users.

“We remain focused on bringing relevant, sought-after apps to the BlackBerry World storefront, and we are excited to announce and welcome these new partners to BlackBerry 10,” BlackBerry World and Global Alliances vice president Martyn Mallick said in a statement.

The applications that will be available soon will include those related to business and productivity, security and compliance, entertainment and multimedia, gaming, lifestyle and sports, news and publications and social.

Among these applications include Bloomberg, ABC, ABC Family, Discovery, Angry Birds—GO!, Bad Piggies, Despicable Me: Minion Rush, Fixmo Sentinel, CBS Sports App, Channel NewsAsia, and WeChat.

These new applications were showcased during the BlackBerry Jam Asia Developer Conference last month in Hong Kong.

BlackBerry further noted that there has been an increase of 28 percent for approved built-for-Blackberry applications in the three weeks since the program refresh launch while average weekly submissions have grown by 266 percent.

The gaming category was found to be the largest in terms of number of applications available and overall number of downloads in the BlackBerry World which is then followed by the lifestyle and recreation category.

The multimedia apps category, on the other hand, has achieved the highest monthly growth ‘of any category while the business and productivity category has posted the quickest growth in the number of applications during the past months.

Blackberry also cited the double growth in the publications and news category in terms of the average number of downloads per application while applications in the social networking category posted the largest number of download per application.  (FREEMAN)