The Blackberry Playbook is still relevant for a small segment of tablet owners. It was the only tablet Blackberry ever released and even though its getting long in the tooth, people still swear by it. One of the most common tasks any longtime user will have done is sideloading their own apps. When you use 3rd party tools like DDPB or the Chrome plugin some apps don’t work and you get errors. The most common ones is -9 and -12, but does that even mean?
Blackberry ceased to support the Playbook with firmware updates and does not maintain their app store anymore. This puts the tablet owners in a position of having to convert the the files themselves and manually load them on their device. The process is easy with the online tools we downloaded, that allow anyone to take an APK file and convert to a Blackberry friendly BAR file.
The most common error code users see when installing apps is Error code -12. This means that the app was designed for a higher version of Android and will not work on the Playbook. The Playbook only has an Android 2.3 emulator, so anything that is not backwards compatible will fail to install.
Error code -9 means that specific libraries are not available and are required for the app to function. This can be due to the app needing an external Data file (OBB) or it may require Google Services to run.
If you are new to converting apps or sideloading in your own apps not only for the Playbook, but ANY Blackberry 10 enabled device, see what all of the fuss is about.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
