I recently got my hands on an old BlackBerry Z30 for just ~$8 USD, quite a deal considering its 2013 specs. That 720p Super AMOLED display, Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro, 16 GB of storage, and 2 GB of RAM were top-tier back in the day.

Unfortunately, it’s permanently stuck with Android Runtime 4.3 (API Level 18), which hasn’t been updated since BB10.0’s initial release. Finding apps or even a compatible version of the Google Play Store is extremely difficult nowadays.

While searching for a solution, I found that cobalt’s patches still work perfectly.

Just follow the steps in the cobalt’s How to Install guide and you’ll be good to go. Important: Do not install cobalt’s patched Play Store itself. Once that’s done, the next step is to find the latest Google Play Store compatible with Android 4.3.

To do this, I used APKMirror to find the APKs.

The latest version of the Google Play Store I could find for Android 4.3 is 25.2.27-16 since Google has dropped support for Android 4.3 since 2021. You can browse other versions for Android 4.3 via the link below:

https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google-inc/google-play-store/variant-%7B%22minapi_slug%22:%22minapi-16%22%7D/

To search for another Android version, simply change minapi-16 in the URL to the desired API level.

I tried looking for API Levels 17 (Android 4.2) and 18 (Android 4.3) all the way up to the latest version but couldn’t find archived versions beyond that.

Once you’ve found a compatible APK, download and install it on your BlackBerry 10 device. The first time you launch the Play Store, it may take a while to load. If it says “Play Store is not responding” just tap Wait and give it some time.

And that’s it, you can now install apps from the Google Play Store!

Known Issues

Some apps may not install properly. For example, TikTok Lite gets stuck in the Installing state and never completes.

Thanks for reading! Happy hacking :)