Back in October, we announced the availability of the second iteration of our Android development tools, which made it easier than ever to bring your Android apps to BlackBerry 10.
October’s release introduced the concept of the BlackBerry ADB Proxy Manager, which allows you to connect your BlackBerry 10 device or simulator to any IDE and run/debug your Android app just as you would on any Android device. Additionally, this release added GUI options for the most popular command-line arguments, which let you verify, repackage and sign your APK file with just a few clicks of your mouse.
Today we’re excited to announce a new beta for our BlackBerry Tools for Android Development, which offers a whole bunch of new features and support offerings.
New GUI Shortcuts
With today’s 2.0.2 beta, we’ve added executable shortcuts for the GUI tools, which removes the need to start them from within a command-prompt or terminal instance. Just double-click the shortcut for the tool you require and you’re good to go! The 2.0.2 command-line tools for Android apps can be downloaded here and extracted anywhere on your Mac or Windows development machine. Official support for Linux is coming soon.
Support for Android Studio
This beta release also includes support for Google’s Android Studio IDE. Even though this IDE is in an early beta phase, we decided to release an alpha plug-in to allow Android developers to easily target BlackBerry 10 devices. The Android Studio alpha plug-in is currently being offered as an offline archive available for download here.
Updated Eclipse Plugin
We will continue to support the ADT plug-in for Eclipse, which has been updated to reflect the 2.0.2 update to our Android tool chain. You can download or upgrade to the newest release by checking out our Tools page.
Expanded Mac and Java Support
Our latest release also includes official support for Mac OS X Mavericks 10.9 as well as Java Development Kit 7.
As always, keep an eye on our BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps Roadmap and the @BlackBerryDev Twitter channel for the latest and greatest news surrounding Android Runtime development on BlackBerry 10.