This morning we announced the new BlackBerry Q20, arriving with the familiar ‘Menu’, ‘Back’, ‘Send’, and ‘End’ buttons and an integrated trackpad. This is big news for developers, and I wanted to provide some details on what you can expect.
As part of our Q-Series line up, you can rest assured that the applications that you’ve built for the Q5 and Q10 will be compatible with this new device. You can think of the hardware buttons as an additional way to navigate and interact with applications. The same touch-based interaction model of all the Q-Series devices will continue to work as usual.
We are also planning to build functionality into the application runtimes, so that your applications react to the new hardware keys as expected. As usual, we’ll be providing tooling, simulators, samples, documentation and SDK updates prior to the launch of the device to ensure that you have ample time to test your applications or explore ways to deeply integrate them with the new hardware features.
We will be providing more information shortly, so that you can explore these new navigation and interaction paradigms in your applications. Happy coding!