 This video is brought to you by the Corsair Voyager Air, the high-performance wireless media hub for your connected life. Visit corsair.com slash voyager-air to learn more. Welcome to the third installment of my BlackBerry iSwitch. This installment, as you can see I have Ted on my BlackBerry, is all about sideloading Android apps. So there's two different main ways of doing this. There's the Google Chrome app way, which you can click here and find the tutorial for that on CrackBerry. Or there's the DDPB way, which you can click here and find the tutorial for that on CrackBerry. Both these ways are actually fairly similar when you get down to it. I prefer the Google Chrome app way because I just find it simpler and easier to set up. Although the DDPB way is not actually that complicated. I just find Google Chrome one more streamlined. So the first thing you're going to want to do is to go into Google Chrome apps and install Playbook app manager. Leave that up on the page on your page or bookmark it at least and then go to your BlackBerry phone. Go into security and privacy and then go into development mode. After enabling this it'll give you an IP and you're going to want to jot that down somewhere and you want to set your own password, which it'll also prompt you for. At this point you're going to want to go into the Chrome app, enter the IP for your phone, which your phone gave you and then enter the password that you set for developer mode and that will connect the Chrome app to your phone. Then you will go to this website. There are other ones, but this one's pretty good in my opinion. It works and I like the Crackberry community, so that's good. And pick BAR files,.bar files. Download the different ones you want. The BAR files are all for like whatever programs you're going to use. I got stuff like Winamp and Google Maps and TED and Instagram and a few things like that. You can get whatever you want. There's I think like a hundred and eighty apps on that list or something like that. Somewhere around there. That's probably wrong, but oh well. Yeah. And then basically you just drag and drop those BAR files after you've downloaded them into the Google Chrome app and the Google Chrome app will install them for you. When it's done installing, it'll say success. When it's done saying success, just disconnect your phone from your computer and you're good to go. I once had to do a restart of my phone to get the app to work. That might have been an isolated case. I'm not sure, but it worked fine after that. I expected this whole process to be actually a lot harder than it really was. I did have problems with Google Maps and Instagram, but what I did was I went into the Google Chrome app, uninstalled the two that I had, downloaded different BAR files than the ones that I had initially downloaded, tried installing those and they both worked fine. So there's different options for some apps. I think Google Maps has like two or three or maybe even four different downloads that you can choose. So if one doesn't work for you, just try another one. It's really not that long of a process to uninstall something and reinstall it once you have the whole process set up. One thing is if you restart your phone, you do have to go back into developer mode. As far as I know, there isn't a way to keep your phone in developer mode. There might be. I haven't really looked into this just as a heads up. And other than that, I didn't run into any problems. It was actually really easy. This is unrelated to side loading apps, but is a problem that I ran into. Before I decided to start side loading apps, I tried to update the system software on my phone. I tried to do the system update and it said it was interrupted. I didn't interrupt it. I don't know anything on the phone that would have interrupted it. I looked up this problem and there was a lot of information on it, which can be a good or bad thing. For this one, I read through it a bit, but didn't have a ton of time and I didn't have a ton of information on my phone. So I decided the fastest way to fix it would be to just factory reset my phone. If I looked into it further, I probably could have fixed it. But factory resetting it was the fastest way for me. After a factory reset, it worked perfectly fine. I hope the overall easiness level of side loading apps doesn't actually make companies lazy. I could see companies go, ah, people can side load our app. It's not a big deal. And then not developing a dedicated app for BlackBerry. We still need dedicated apps, guys. They work pretty good, but there is some functionality that you can tell is not necessarily tuned for the device. And I have found a few problems there. There are ways around it, but it just maybe adds a few clicks or adds a few somethings that are just not entirely enjoyable. If you currently own a BlackBerry, I would highly recommend starting to side load apps onto your phone. It's great. It's really not that hard. I could easily teach my mom to do it or maybe set it up and then my mom could do it on her own afterwards. It's just wonderful. I wanted Ted Talks on my phone. I wanted Google Maps on my phone. I wanted a few other things. I was able to side load everything I really, really wanted. And now this phone is able to do much more than it could for me before, which is great and a really easy way to add a lot of functionality to your BlackBerry. I know we got a little bit away from the weekly release schedule of these BlackBerry iSwitch videos due to stuff like Computex. But thank you for watching the third installment of my BlackBerry iSwitched. The next installment will be more of a conclusion, just an over wrapping comment on everything that I've done so far. If you like side loading apps, if you're interested in side loading apps, comment in the comments. I'm sure people can answer all your questions. And don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips.