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BlackBerry CEO Wants FCC to Make Developing BlackBerry Apps Mandatory

63 points by msabalau 12y ago

commentzorro 12y ago
Seems like the game of blog "telephone" has gotten a bit out of hand here. The original letter to the senate seems to say that _services_ should be available to all platforms. (Still a dubious argument though.) By the time we hit TechCrunch it's being worded as, "... if a company makes an app for iOS and Android, they must also make a version for BlackBerry and all other operating systems." Good link bait though.
msabalau 12y ago
I suppose if you are the type of person who thinks that it makes sense to be CEO of BlackBerry, you are the type of person who thinks it is reasonable to ask the the government forces developers to write apps for your failed platform.
- sospep 12y ago
  > I suppose if you are the type of person who thinks that it makes sense to be CEO of BlackBerry Chen is known in the corporate world as somewhat of a turnaround artist. Blackberry needed a turnaround. That could have been why it "made sense" for him, or perhaps the 80ish million a year there paying him.
X-combinator 12y ago
Plainly "Not-going-to-happen." BlackBerry should pay developers to write apps for them. Not force hardworking Programmers to develop apps for them.
- axaxs 12y ago
  Been there, done that. At one point they were giving away tablets in exchange for an app, so thought I'd give it a go. Their development process was more or less "write an android app, then run it through a converter.". So I did, and it worked rather poorly. Got my tablet, wrote off Bb for good.
- omgitstom 12y ago
  This is exactly what microsoft was doing, and it didn't work for them. My few friends with windows phone say the apps were great when they launched (developed with the $100K+ microsoft handout), but now are not maintained and buggy and crash.
duncan_bayne 12y ago
Well, he's right in one sense: legislatively mandated net neutrality is actually no less rights-violating than forcing app developers to support Blackberry.
- shard972 12y ago
  Your wrong, net neutrality is about HUMAN RIGHTS. All packet should be EQUAL, it's about EQUALITY. You should watch out, you are on the wrong side of history.
  - cheald 12y ago
    Come on, what a silly stance. Packets from a botnet engaged in a DDOS should be routed at the same priority as all other packets because packet routing is a human right on par with "the right to not be enslaved" and "the right to potable water"?
- bactatin 12y ago
  Wrong.
  - duncan_bayne 12y ago
    Care to elaborate?
coding4all 12y ago
Blackberry can go fuck itself. Blackberry had a qwerty board on their phones long before anyone else and yet they decided to rely on being the only player in town instead of innovating. I hope Firefox OS takes over and the Blackberry CEO has no choice but to switch to it because of the great ecosystem.
verelo 12y ago
If the BB platform wasn't a hunk of junk I would probably agree, it is creating an unfair playing field. The reality is, the blackberry dev tools are not equal, they are terrible and the reason we do not build for BB is not because we're evil and do not like them, its because they do not provide the tools to run a profitable business on their sub-par platform. To be fair, the iOS and Android platforms are far from perfect, but they have enough user facing features that consumers like that they gain significant distribution and allows companies to build apps at a profit. BB need to build better products, maybe then they will see people want to work with them. This is just a CEO who doesn't get it complaining because he isn't smart enough to fix the problem he was hired to solve.
- bactatin 12y ago
  Nothing you said is relevant in a free country. No one mandates software, it's called make your own.
  - shard972 12y ago
    But that leads to platform inequality. Wake up, it's 2015, stop being regressive.
  - verelo 12y ago
    To be clear, i'm not saying its the right thing to do and that i morally agree, i just see the argument they're making in comparison to the net neutrality argument and feel its a creative position that makes me stop to re-think things I previously felt were fair and valid. I don't think this is enough to change my mind on anything, but its interesting all the same.
bactatin 12y ago
Make your own competing apps and quit bothering people. This guy has the mind of a child. I develop for the platforms I want, if he wants rules like this, try communist Russia.
shard972 12y ago
Might as well get them on this after they have control of the internet. Could make some cash.
vacri 12y ago
Every OS? I look forward to seeing Blackberry's apps on IOS. Note, that is 'IOS', the cisco OS, not Apple's 'iOS'. :) In any case, the concept of 'net neutrality', when applied to code, is 'open source'. It's not 'you must do free work for me', but 'here is the code without favouring anyone'. Of course, this is just a publicity stunt to get people talking about BB.
mdm_ 12y ago
For some context, read BlackBerry COO Marty Beard's blog post[1] from a few weeks ago. I don't think Chen or anyone else at BlackBerry thinks the government should compel anyone to write apps for their specific platform, in fact that's the very mindset they're criticizing. What they're getting at is that services should leverage open technologies so that nobody's platform gets shut out, which I believe is also a core value of Mozilla and Firefox OS, for example. It's not just a matter of BlackBerry vs. the world; how many apps are iOS-first or iOS-exclusive, despite the market domination of Android? I think Chen and Beard are advocating for the tearing down of the "walled garden" world of mobile platforms. I use a BlackBerry Passport as my daily driver, and although I have both native apps and sideloaded Android apps via Amazon App Store and Snap, a lot of my most regularly used items are mobile websites. Many companies have excellent mobile sites, you can save them as bookmarks to your homescreen, they pull in the favicon and look just like apps. You don't have to install updates for them or worry that they'll stop supporting your OS version or particular hardware, and a lot of times they're a better experience than the corresponding native (or sideloaded) apps. [1] http://blogs.blackberry.com/2015/01/surprising-winner-of-html5-apps-war/ http://blogs.blackberry.com/2015/01/surprising-winner-of-htm...
- ekianjo 12y ago
  > What they're getting at is that services should leverage open technologies so that nobody's platform gets shut out No one should force any company anything. It's a company's choice to do native apps, web apps, or whatever they like. They are probably missing some part of the market by not developing for some platforms or not having mobile versions of their apps - that's their problem, and it makes them ripe for competition sooner or later. And it's also very hypocritical for a company like Blackberry to ask for this kind of things after largely benefiting from being in position of strength for many years and doing NOTHING to drive multiplatforms support. Now that they are at the bottom, they "require" their platform to be considered for all apps. That's laughable at best.
  - mdm_ 12y ago
    There's been significant (to put it mildly) turnover at BlackBerry since it was in a position of strength, so IMHO it's not exactly fair to call the company hypocritical. I should hope all the new people have some new ideas and maybe a different philosophy.
moeedm 12y ago
Hey Blackberry, how about you just make a product that doesn't suck?
venomsnake 12y ago
Can we first kill the walled gardens? Then we could talk about platform coverage.
Canada 12y ago
I've done it, and hearing that makes me want to delete it. BB developer tools are horrible. BB ignores developer questions on their own forums, even though they appear to have about as much traffic as my blog: Almost none. Also, the 90s called. It wants it's developer portal back. It actually asks if you want to restrict your app to certain carriers, (please, tell me more about neutrality!) and for export license numbers if you encrypt anything. You have to apply to a manual process for push messaging IDs, which demands everything short of pissing in a cup. And don't even get me started on the latency of message delivery. Want apps? Try fixing half of that and see what happens. And I never got the free device I was promised.
- walterbell 12y ago
  An "API neutrality" proposal would make more sense. E.g. Apple wouldn't need to develop iMessage clients for non-Apple platforms, but they would not be able to block non-Apple platform client apps (developed by anyone) from connecting to the API. See HTTP, IMAP, Exchange, NFS, Windows SMB, etc.
  - declan 12y ago
    Apple develops iMessage, and gives it away for free on iOS, as a way to make its own platforms more attractive. Let's say this hypothetical "API neutrality" proposal were to go through -- note the actual letter from Blackberry's CEO never mentioned the phrase "API"[1] -- then Apple might simply stop developing iMessage. Unless your hypothetical law forces them to make the API available and keep it available indefinitely to all comers, effectively subsidizing their competitors out of their own pocket. [1] http://blogs.blackberry.com/2015/01/blackberry-net-neutrality/ http://blogs.blackberry.com/2015/01/blackberry-net-neutralit...
    - walterbell 12y ago
      > Apple might simply stop developing iMessage Or they might find other ways to make Apple platforms more attractive, without forced bundling of service APIs and platform clients. Today, many customers use Apple's Mail client to access multiple email services. Since iMessage competitors (e.g. WhatsApp, BBM) would face the same regulations, Apple would have the option of supporting multiple message APIs in their client, giving customers more choice among competing services, and giving customers more choice among competing clients on each platform. We have years of data on Apple restrictions on web browser rendering on iOS, they have many possible mechanisms to advantage native clients of open APIs.
natch 12y ago
"Apple does not allow BlackBerry or Android users to download Apple’s iMessage messaging service." Wow. Download the service? I hate to nitpick just one sentence when his proposal is so mind-bogglingly ridiculous, but can it be that the quality of the phrasing reflects the quality of thinking? Given the proposal, I'm afraid so.
SocksCanClose 12y ago
philosophical point here: note the bb ceo's use of language. i hate to get pedantic, but this all goes back to the greek word γινώσκω (gnoscio), which means "to think" or "to know". from this word we get, in the english, words like "decide", "discern" and even "discriminate". i'll quote mr. chen here, piece by piece: "...policymakers should demand..." --> children demand. policymakers (and i assume he means congress, which is the constitutionally-empowered entity that is able to make law in the united states) make laws. and laws are supported with the power of the state to do two things: tax, and kill (in fact, they are the same power). so what this means is "congress should use its power to use lethal force..." "... openness not just at the traffic/transport layer, but also at the content/applications layer of the ecosystem..." --> net neutrality is about agnosticism. there goes that word again, 'to think'. here, it's about not thinking -- particularly not thinking about whose data is traveling along your pipes. but once you move from the traffic/transport layer down to the content/applications layer (or heck -- in a chaostheoryesque way, once you move up to the operating systems layer) the medium is the message! this is the equivalent of a declining myspace begging congress to force facebook to allow myspace users to interact with the facebook users. the medium is the message here: facebook exists because it is not myspace. trulia is not redfin. people started companies because they disliked the platforms available and they sought to build better ones. "...Banning carriers from discriminating but allowing content and applications providers to continue doing so will solve nothing." there is zero comparability in this last statement. content and application providers are built atop an architecture that is by its nature exclusive and discriminatory. service providers are defined not by what is within them, but what moves through them. which is to say: teraflops (&c.) per second of data moving from various points to another. applications on the other hand are defined by what resides within them. music (spotify: beats needs to allow us to stream music to its listeners!). videos (vimeo: youtube needs to let us share their videos!). games (counterstrike: why can't people play our missions as the master chief?! ¡¡¡net neutrality!!!). the list goes on. make no mistake: this is one more step down a road that leads nowhere good.
malkia 12y ago
Wow! Wonder if game consoles go same way... lol...
andrewfong 12y ago
While forcing people to make apps for BlackBerry is a terrible, terrible idea, there's something to be said for restricting content and service providers from creating artificial OS-specific restrictions. The example BlackBerry uses is Apple prohibiting the development of an iMessage client on any platform except iOS. While it's unreasonable to expect Apple to write an iMessage client for BlackBerry, it's also sort of unreasonable to prevent BlackBerry from writing its own client. Another example that comes to mind is Google's treatment from Windows Phone, which arguably goes beyond simply refusing to write native clients for Windows Phone to active discrimination -- some incidents that come to mind are the degradation of Google Maps and shutting off the Windows Phone YouTube client. In some sense, this is really just an extension of standard antitrust law. It's anti-competitive to use your dominance in one field (e.g. operating systems) to squash competition in another (e.g. browsers). The leap here would be to say that something like iMessages or any of the various Google services constitute a monopoly (or should be regulated as if they were a monopoly). In contrast, it's a little more palatable to extend this to something like net neutrality because many ISPs do effectively have a local monopoly or duopoly. Anyhow, not saying that I agree with them, but I think the post is more than a simple please-make-other-people-write-apps-for-BB plea.
- dshankar 12y ago
  Your example of a law that would force Apple to allow Blackberry to write its own iMessage client would open two major problems: - companies like Twitter would be forced to allow 3rd-parties to write clients, and could kill Twitter's sources of revenue - Blackberry could write an insecure client & harm Apple customers In general, open APIs and third-party development is a great thing. But to require it? That's extreme. Besides, isn't proprietary technology an excellent way to differentiate product offerings? Why must it be accessible on competing platforms and thus invalidate my differentiating value?
  - andrewfong 12y ago
    Which is why I added "not saying I agree with them". But requiring an open API (or at least not placing restrictions on an existing API) isn't conceptually all that different from requiring Microsoft to allow browsers other than IE on Windows, and apparently a lot of people think that's a good idea.
bdcravens 12y ago
I admit - I really miss Word Mole and Brickbreaker from the Blackberry. They should definitely be forced to port those apps to iOS!
mozey 12y ago
Interesting that no-one has mentioned HTML5 yet. If everyone programmed web apps for this platform then "app neutrality" would not be an issue. Assuming the devices all implemented the spec consistently.
- cheald 12y ago
  > Assuming the devices all implemented the spec consistently. That's an assumption big enough to drive a truck through. In my experience, every platform needs custom support or hacks to fix little annoyances, problems and incompatibilities. You end up with de facto per-platform support even though you're using common tech.
EGreg 12y ago
The distributist in me would say that Platforms Should Be Free, as it's the public's collective interest since more wealth is created that way.
dogma1138 12y ago
Considering that BB OS10 has an Android Run Time which runs the vast majority of Android Apps whats the point? I've recently purchased a BlackBerry Passport and i absolutely love the device, I have a OnePlus, Nexus 6, and a MotoG as well and the square screen format and the keyboard just take it home for me. As far as internet browsing, reading, and light content creation goes the Passport is by far the best phone out there atm. It's also one of the first devices in which BB decided to put not only good but virtually top of the line hardware so you are getting a quad core 801 snapdragon, with 3GB of RAM and 32GB + SD card. I would wish that the BB market place would actually get some love it looks like the Android market from 2008-9 where 99% of the apps are scam, malware, overpriced shortcut apps, and bible and point me to mecca apps. Even the "built for BB" apps on the market tend to run worse than their Android versions running in the Android Runtime Environment. And since even Google Services can be ported to BB OS10 there isn't even an issue with apps that require Google Account/Play Services any more.
dang 12y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8927539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8927539
fit2rule 12y ago
I've got a better idea: make all these fruitcakes use the same freaking OS and stop re-inventing the same thing over and over - i.e. get the government to standardize the OS. Oh, okay, never mind. Free market for the win.

63 points by msabalau 12y ago

Seems like the game of blog "telephone" has gotten a bit out of hand here. The original letter to the senate seems to say that _services_ should be available to all platforms. (Still a dubious argument though.) By the time we hit TechCrunch it's being worded as, "... if a company makes an app for iOS and Android, they must also make a version for BlackBerry and all other operating systems." Good link bait though.

msabalau 12y ago

I suppose if you are the type of person who thinks that it makes sense to be CEO of BlackBerry, you are the type of person who thinks it is reasonable to ask the the government forces developers to write apps for your failed platform.

sospep 12y ago
> I suppose if you are the type of person who thinks that it makes sense to be CEO of BlackBerry Chen is known in the corporate world as somewhat of a turnaround artist. Blackberry needed a turnaround. That could have been why it "made sense" for him, or perhaps the 80ish million a year there paying him.

X-combinator 12y ago

Plainly "Not-going-to-happen." BlackBerry should pay developers to write apps for them. Not force hardworking Programmers to develop apps for them.

axaxs 12y ago
Been there, done that. At one point they were giving away tablets in exchange for an app, so thought I'd give it a go. Their development process was more or less "write an android app, then run it through a converter.". So I did, and it worked rather poorly. Got my tablet, wrote off Bb for good.
omgitstom 12y ago
This is exactly what microsoft was doing, and it didn't work for them. My few friends with windows phone say the apps were great when they launched (developed with the $100K+ microsoft handout), but now are not maintained and buggy and crash.

duncan_bayne 12y ago

Well, he's right in one sense: legislatively mandated net neutrality is actually no less rights-violating than forcing app developers to support Blackberry.

shard972 12y ago
Your wrong, net neutrality is about HUMAN RIGHTS. All packet should be EQUAL, it's about EQUALITY. You should watch out, you are on the wrong side of history.
- cheald 12y ago
  Come on, what a silly stance. Packets from a botnet engaged in a DDOS should be routed at the same priority as all other packets because packet routing is a human right on par with "the right to not be enslaved" and "the right to potable water"?
bactatin 12y ago
Wrong.
- duncan_bayne 12y ago
  Care to elaborate?

coding4all 12y ago

Blackberry can go fuck itself. Blackberry had a qwerty board on their phones long before anyone else and yet they decided to rely on being the only player in town instead of innovating. I hope Firefox OS takes over and the Blackberry CEO has no choice but to switch to it because of the great ecosystem.

verelo 12y ago

If the BB platform wasn't a hunk of junk I would probably agree, it is creating an unfair playing field. The reality is, the blackberry dev tools are not equal, they are terrible and the reason we do not build for BB is not because we're evil and do not like them, its because they do not provide the tools to run a profitable business on their sub-par platform. To be fair, the iOS and Android platforms are far from perfect, but they have enough user facing features that consumers like that they gain significant distribution and allows companies to build apps at a profit. BB need to build better products, maybe then they will see people want to work with them. This is just a CEO who doesn't get it complaining because he isn't smart enough to fix the problem he was hired to solve.

bactatin 12y ago
Nothing you said is relevant in a free country. No one mandates software, it's called make your own.
- shard972 12y ago
  But that leads to platform inequality. Wake up, it's 2015, stop being regressive.
- verelo 12y ago
  To be clear, i'm not saying its the right thing to do and that i morally agree, i just see the argument they're making in comparison to the net neutrality argument and feel its a creative position that makes me stop to re-think things I previously felt were fair and valid. I don't think this is enough to change my mind on anything, but its interesting all the same.

bactatin 12y ago

Make your own competing apps and quit bothering people. This guy has the mind of a child. I develop for the platforms I want, if he wants rules like this, try communist Russia.

shard972 12y ago

Might as well get them on this after they have control of the internet. Could make some cash.

vacri 12y ago

Every OS? I look forward to seeing Blackberry's apps on IOS. Note, that is 'IOS', the cisco OS, not Apple's 'iOS'. :) In any case, the concept of 'net neutrality', when applied to code, is 'open source'. It's not 'you must do free work for me', but 'here is the code without favouring anyone'. Of course, this is just a publicity stunt to get people talking about BB.

mdm_ 12y ago

For some context, read BlackBerry COO Marty Beard's blog post[1] from a few weeks ago. I don't think Chen or anyone else at BlackBerry thinks the government should compel anyone to write apps for their specific platform, in fact that's the very mindset they're criticizing. What they're getting at is that services should leverage open technologies so that nobody's platform gets shut out, which I believe is also a core value of Mozilla and Firefox OS, for example. It's not just a matter of BlackBerry vs. the world; how many apps are iOS-first or iOS-exclusive, despite the market domination of Android? I think Chen and Beard are advocating for the tearing down of the "walled garden" world of mobile platforms. I use a BlackBerry Passport as my daily driver, and although I have both native apps and sideloaded Android apps via Amazon App Store and Snap, a lot of my most regularly used items are mobile websites. Many companies have excellent mobile sites, you can save them as bookmarks to your homescreen, they pull in the favicon and look just like apps. You don't have to install updates for them or worry that they'll stop supporting your OS version or particular hardware, and a lot of times they're a better experience than the corresponding native (or sideloaded) apps. [1] http://blogs.blackberry.com/2015/01/surprising-winner-of-html5-apps-war/ http://blogs.blackberry.com/2015/01/surprising-winner-of-htm...

ekianjo 12y ago
> What they're getting at is that services should leverage open technologies so that nobody's platform gets shut out No one should force any company anything. It's a company's choice to do native apps, web apps, or whatever they like. They are probably missing some part of the market by not developing for some platforms or not having mobile versions of their apps - that's their problem, and it makes them ripe for competition sooner or later. And it's also very hypocritical for a company like Blackberry to ask for this kind of things after largely benefiting from being in position of strength for many years and doing NOTHING to drive multiplatforms support. Now that they are at the bottom, they "require" their platform to be considered for all apps. That's laughable at best.
- mdm_ 12y ago
  There's been significant (to put it mildly) turnover at BlackBerry since it was in a position of strength, so IMHO it's not exactly fair to call the company hypocritical. I should hope all the new people have some new ideas and maybe a different philosophy.

moeedm 12y ago

Hey Blackberry, how about you just make a product that doesn't suck?

venomsnake 12y ago

Can we first kill the walled gardens? Then we could talk about platform coverage.

Canada 12y ago

I've done it, and hearing that makes me want to delete it. BB developer tools are horrible. BB ignores developer questions on their own forums, even though they appear to have about as much traffic as my blog: Almost none. Also, the 90s called. It wants it's developer portal back. It actually asks if you want to restrict your app to certain carriers, (please, tell me more about neutrality!) and for export license numbers if you encrypt anything. You have to apply to a manual process for push messaging IDs, which demands everything short of pissing in a cup. And don't even get me started on the latency of message delivery. Want apps? Try fixing half of that and see what happens. And I never got the free device I was promised.

walterbell 12y ago
An "API neutrality" proposal would make more sense. E.g. Apple wouldn't need to develop iMessage clients for non-Apple platforms, but they would not be able to block non-Apple platform client apps (developed by anyone) from connecting to the API. See HTTP, IMAP, Exchange, NFS, Windows SMB, etc.
- declan 12y ago
  Apple develops iMessage, and gives it away for free on iOS, as a way to make its own platforms more attractive. Let's say this hypothetical "API neutrality" proposal were to go through -- note the actual letter from Blackberry's CEO never mentioned the phrase "API"[1] -- then Apple might simply stop developing iMessage. Unless your hypothetical law forces them to make the API available and keep it available indefinitely to all comers, effectively subsidizing their competitors out of their own pocket. [1] http://blogs.blackberry.com/2015/01/blackberry-net-neutrality/ http://blogs.blackberry.com/2015/01/blackberry-net-neutralit...
  - walterbell 12y ago
    > Apple might simply stop developing iMessage Or they might find other ways to make Apple platforms more attractive, without forced bundling of service APIs and platform clients. Today, many customers use Apple's Mail client to access multiple email services. Since iMessage competitors (e.g. WhatsApp, BBM) would face the same regulations, Apple would have the option of supporting multiple message APIs in their client, giving customers more choice among competing services, and giving customers more choice among competing clients on each platform. We have years of data on Apple restrictions on web browser rendering on iOS, they have many possible mechanisms to advantage native clients of open APIs.

natch 12y ago

"Apple does not allow BlackBerry or Android users to download Apple’s iMessage messaging service." Wow. Download the service? I hate to nitpick just one sentence when his proposal is so mind-bogglingly ridiculous, but can it be that the quality of the phrasing reflects the quality of thinking? Given the proposal, I'm afraid so.

SocksCanClose 12y ago

philosophical point here: note the bb ceo's use of language. i hate to get pedantic, but this all goes back to the greek word γινώσκω (gnoscio), which means "to think" or "to know". from this word we get, in the english, words like "decide", "discern" and even "discriminate". i'll quote mr. chen here, piece by piece: "...policymakers should demand..." --> children demand. policymakers (and i assume he means congress, which is the constitutionally-empowered entity that is able to make law in the united states) make laws. and laws are supported with the power of the state to do two things: tax, and kill (in fact, they are the same power). so what this means is "congress should use its power to use lethal force..." "... openness not just at the traffic/transport layer, but also at the content/applications layer of the ecosystem..." --> net neutrality is about agnosticism. there goes that word again, 'to think'. here, it's about not thinking -- particularly not thinking about whose data is traveling along your pipes. but once you move from the traffic/transport layer down to the content/applications layer (or heck -- in a chaostheoryesque way, once you move up to the operating systems layer) the medium is the message! this is the equivalent of a declining myspace begging congress to force facebook to allow myspace users to interact with the facebook users. the medium is the message here: facebook exists because it is not myspace. trulia is not redfin. people started companies because they disliked the platforms available and they sought to build better ones. "...Banning carriers from discriminating but allowing content and applications providers to continue doing so will solve nothing." there is zero comparability in this last statement. content and application providers are built atop an architecture that is by its nature exclusive and discriminatory. service providers are defined not by what is within them, but what moves through them. which is to say: teraflops (&c.) per second of data moving from various points to another. applications on the other hand are defined by what resides within them. music (spotify: beats needs to allow us to stream music to its listeners!). videos (vimeo: youtube needs to let us share their videos!). games (counterstrike: why can't people play our missions as the master chief?! ¡¡¡net neutrality!!!). the list goes on. make no mistake: this is one more step down a road that leads nowhere good.

malkia 12y ago

Wow! Wonder if game consoles go same way... lol...

andrewfong 12y ago

While forcing people to make apps for BlackBerry is a terrible, terrible idea, there's something to be said for restricting content and service providers from creating artificial OS-specific restrictions. The example BlackBerry uses is Apple prohibiting the development of an iMessage client on any platform except iOS. While it's unreasonable to expect Apple to write an iMessage client for BlackBerry, it's also sort of unreasonable to prevent BlackBerry from writing its own client. Another example that comes to mind is Google's treatment from Windows Phone, which arguably goes beyond simply refusing to write native clients for Windows Phone to active discrimination -- some incidents that come to mind are the degradation of Google Maps and shutting off the Windows Phone YouTube client. In some sense, this is really just an extension of standard antitrust law. It's anti-competitive to use your dominance in one field (e.g. operating systems) to squash competition in another (e.g. browsers). The leap here would be to say that something like iMessages or any of the various Google services constitute a monopoly (or should be regulated as if they were a monopoly). In contrast, it's a little more palatable to extend this to something like net neutrality because many ISPs do effectively have a local monopoly or duopoly. Anyhow, not saying that I agree with them, but I think the post is more than a simple please-make-other-people-write-apps-for-BB plea.

dshankar 12y ago
Your example of a law that would force Apple to allow Blackberry to write its own iMessage client would open two major problems: - companies like Twitter would be forced to allow 3rd-parties to write clients, and could kill Twitter's sources of revenue - Blackberry could write an insecure client & harm Apple customers In general, open APIs and third-party development is a great thing. But to require it? That's extreme. Besides, isn't proprietary technology an excellent way to differentiate product offerings? Why must it be accessible on competing platforms and thus invalidate my differentiating value?
- andrewfong 12y ago
  Which is why I added "not saying I agree with them". But requiring an open API (or at least not placing restrictions on an existing API) isn't conceptually all that different from requiring Microsoft to allow browsers other than IE on Windows, and apparently a lot of people think that's a good idea.

bdcravens 12y ago

I admit - I really miss Word Mole and Brickbreaker from the Blackberry. They should definitely be forced to port those apps to iOS!

mozey 12y ago

Interesting that no-one has mentioned HTML5 yet. If everyone programmed web apps for this platform then "app neutrality" would not be an issue. Assuming the devices all implemented the spec consistently.

cheald 12y ago
> Assuming the devices all implemented the spec consistently. That's an assumption big enough to drive a truck through. In my experience, every platform needs custom support or hacks to fix little annoyances, problems and incompatibilities. You end up with de facto per-platform support even though you're using common tech.

EGreg 12y ago

The distributist in me would say that Platforms Should Be Free, as it's the public's collective interest since more wealth is created that way.

dogma1138 12y ago

Considering that BB OS10 has an Android Run Time which runs the vast majority of Android Apps whats the point? I've recently purchased a BlackBerry Passport and i absolutely love the device, I have a OnePlus, Nexus 6, and a MotoG as well and the square screen format and the keyboard just take it home for me. As far as internet browsing, reading, and light content creation goes the Passport is by far the best phone out there atm. It's also one of the first devices in which BB decided to put not only good but virtually top of the line hardware so you are getting a quad core 801 snapdragon, with 3GB of RAM and 32GB + SD card. I would wish that the BB market place would actually get some love it looks like the Android market from 2008-9 where 99% of the apps are scam, malware, overpriced shortcut apps, and bible and point me to mecca apps. Even the "built for BB" apps on the market tend to run worse than their Android versions running in the Android Runtime Environment. And since even Google Services can be ported to BB OS10 there isn't even an issue with apps that require Google Account/Play Services any more.

dang 12y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8927539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8927539

fit2rule 12y ago

I've got a better idea: make all these fruitcakes use the same freaking OS and stop re-inventing the same thing over and over - i.e. get the government to standardize the OS. Oh, okay, never mind. Free market for the win.