Testing Cordova Apps on Your BlackBerry 10 Phone

Apache Cordova, better known as PhoneGap, Adobe’s commercialized edition of Cordova, allows developers to create apps for a variety of platforms using a single HTML5, CSS and JavaScript code base. This approach of cross-platform development works for all established mobile platforms and doesn’t stop at exotic ones, such as BlackBerry 10.

Despite its infinitesimal market share, there are valid reasons to target the BlackBerry 10 platform. Adding BlackBerry 10 as a target platform to a Cordova-based project is as easy as running the cordova platform add blackberry10 command on your terminal. However, if you try to deploy your app to the device and run cordova run blackberry10, you might stumble upon the following error message:

blackberry-nativepackager cannot be found on the path. Aborting.

It seems as if we are missing the native platform SDK here. In this article, I want to show you which steps are required in order to successfully run and debug your Cordova-based app on your BlackBerry 10 phone. Please note that I’m using OS X, so the exact steps may and will differ on other platforms.

Note: macOS 10.12 Sierra does not support the BlackBerry Link drivers required to connect to your device.

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