"We're working with you, our developer community, to ensure you can still quickly and easily test your apps on real hardware," he posted. He reiterated RIM's pledge to hand out prototype devices for developers, along with the first look at the official BlackBerry 10 native SDK tool at the upcoming "BlackBerry 10 Jam" event for developers at the annual user conference in Orlando.

In response to a reporter's query for clarification, RIM's PR team provided a link to Saunders' blog post.

At the CrackBerry forum, one poster, ad19, wrote in response, "Looks like side-loading is here to stay, but in a modified version. If implemented correctly, I think this should work just fine."

"I'm cautiously optimistic on this," agreed another, with the handle of TBone4eva. "It means that RIM is saying that [they] are only protecting apps from being pirated from App World, but not disabling development mode completely by encrypting the App World apps so they can't be sideloaded. I think that is completely fair."

But another user, BuzzStarField, posted: "Note also that there is already a method available to 'side-load' unsigned apps to PB so that we can test them. This method uses a type of temporary authorization known as 'debug tokens'. - and this method is much more efficient than loading signed apps. We do not know how RIM is going to allow us to distribute signed apps for beta testing or even if they will."