BlackBerry® evangelists met with Android™ developers last week at AnDevCon III in Burlingame, CA to talk about the cool development options of bringing Android apps to the BlackBerry platform, and how to publish them on the BlackBerry App World™ storefront to reach a global audience. The word of how easy the process is started to spread out quickly among conference participants at two full-house events on day one of the conference – the Lightning Talk presented by Larry McDonough, Head of Developer Evangelism Americas at Research In Motion (who talked about bringing existing Android apps to the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet), and at the class taught by Rajeev Mohindra, Director, Handheld App Architecture (about running Android applications on BlackBerry).

More BlackBerry development action was happening at the RIM booth, where developers signed up as vendors to BlackBerry App World and learned from BlackBerry experts how to use some of the tools for BlackBerry Runtime for Android apps to convert their Android “apk” files into BlackBerry-compatible “bar” files. Those developers who completed both these steps became the happy recipients of a free BlackBerry PlayBook tablet on which to continue their development work. That they were all excited to convert their Android apps for the BlackBerry platform is an understatement — not to mention how pleasantly surprised they were to see how easy it was to make their apps work on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet without having to change any code. The BlackBerry team saw all kinds of interesting apps – ranging from games to educational – all successfully ported to the BlackBerry platform.

To top it all off, a BlackBerry PlayBook tablet was in the mix for the AnDevCon III Winner’s Circle Prize, and was won by Erol Yesin from Navman Wireless. Congratulations to Erol and to all the other developers from whom we are waiting to hear back soon with progress updates.

You can catch up with us again in a couple of weeks, as the BlackBerry 10 Jam World Tour will be making a stop in Santa Clara, California.