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Blackberry might switch to Android as OS
- heimatau 11y agoI can't help but shake my head at the title of this article. Why spend millions on an OS to be at the whim of someone else? It's a bad business move. BB has to do something and this could work but...in the long run this is either killing your ecosystem or positioning it to sell.
- bbcbasic 11y agoThey will selling yet another Android phone, and that isn't good for margins.
- TTPrograms 11y agoThey could fork and focus on stability, performance and security. Throw in a physical keyboard and some enterprise software subscriptions and it could differentiate pretty well. Then they have the added benefit of access to the Android app market instead of competing to reach critical mass on their own app market.
- afarrell 11y agoI wonder if they could create their own android app market that had a more rigorous audit process.
- bdcravens 11y agoThose who carry BB's do it for the messaging. Android options with a high quality keyboard are slim to none. Heck, if they created a version of their keyboard for the iPhone, they'd sell like crazy. (not the first iphone kb, but would the first BB keyboard for the iphone)
- JoshTriplett 11y agoIf they manage to sell an up-to-date Android device with a keyboard, there's a substantial market of people who want one.
- macspoofing 11y agoIs there?
- cwyers 11y agoI don't really think so. It's a market that a lot of the big Android vendors were in at one point and got out of. There's some demand for it, but I think it's a more vocal market segment than it is sizeable.
- JoshTriplett 11y agoAndroid vendors got out of that market for two reasons: because omitting a hardware keyboard makes it easier to compete on screen size, and because hardware keyboards require hardware localization. However, Blackberry's original target market was people who wanted to take their email on the road, and their remaining users are far more likely than most to want to hold onto their keyboards.
- cwyers 11y agoBlackberry's remaining users are a rounding error. If Blackberry could make money selling phones to their remaining users they wouldn't be thinking of making Android devices. Blackberry would need to find some way to sell Android phones to people who are using either Android or iOS devices now or to people who are still using feature phones. Either way, I don't think that the keyboard is the big differentiator that will let them do better than LG or Sony or HTC, or even help them catch up to those.
- Justin_K 11y agoThey should have done this 6 years ago. They make good devices, shitty OS. As far as shaking your head, I don't see you pushing a better plan ... maybe they should continue with BB OS? HA. Maybe they should develop a new OS? HA. This is their only option.
- shyn3 11y agoWhy HA? Have you used it?
- lqdc13 11y agoI'm pretty sure most people would agree their OS is inferior.
- geggam 11y agoIn what way ? ... out of the box the BB does everything I need. I have to reboot my iPhone6 sometimes and the rest of the family reboots their androids weekly. I dont reboot the BB... it just works. For games... sure android and iphones are great but some of us dont use these devices as toys
- threeseed 11y agoYou must be joking. iPhones and to a lesser extent Androids are ubiquitous now in the enterprise. So unless you think people who work there in are just using their phones for games then I would be taking your statement with a grain of salt. I work for an enterprise (market cap 50 billion) and our tens of thousands of employees all use iPhones.
- geggam 11y agoCompany I work for only has a market cap of 29Billion * sad face * . Work provides me with an iPhone6 and I have a q10. The iPhone6 is a hotspot with games and needs rebooting. The Q10 just works. Just because everyone is using something doesnt mean its the best tool for the job. I reiterate. I find the blackberry to work out of the box for anything I would need to do at work and its more reliable. I didnt say you couldnt use an Iphone for work... just said its not as good
- bdcravens 11y agoWorks pretty well for a ton of other vendors.
- coryl 11y agoHmm, are any of the handset manufacturers making profit? I think Samsung's phone division is losing money.
- jfb 11y agoOther than Apple, no, not really. It's a commodity business and those are tough.
- adevine 11y agoNot really. Apple takes something on the order of 90% of ALL cell phone profits worldwide (I've seen figures from 89 to 93%). Even Samsung is having difficulty because there have been lots of new Android competitors. That said, while it's estimated that Android vendors take ~10% of cell phone profits, that's better than Windows Phone and BB, which take 0%.
- UnoriginalGuy 11y agoYou're misremembering the figures. The headline was "Apple, Samsung claim 95% of all cellphone profits worldwide." And it is 70% Apple and 25% Samsung. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/31/business/la-fi-tn-apple-samsung-95-percent-global-phone-profits-20130131 http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/31/business/la-fi-tn-ap...
- PKop 11y agoThat article is over 2 years old. The numbers have changed, in apples favor: http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/26/apple-eating-all-the-profits/#.xc3gca:1Gm7 http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/26/apple-eating-all-the-profit...
- cwyers 11y agoI don't disagree with the general thrust of your point here -- being an Android OEM is a thankless task, especially if you look past Samsung (who is probably wishing they had used Tizen at this point) and see everybody else. I do think that Windows Phone is in a better position than BB, partly because they have about an order of magnitude higher market share right now, partly because Microsoft has a lot of other lines of business making money that they can throw at Windows Phone for roughly forever, and partly because they own the phone maker and the platform. In some ways, Microsoft is even better off than a lot of Android OEMs at this point. Android OEMs get to make their meager profits when the device is sold, and Google makes all the other money off the device owner for the rest of the device's lifetime -- they get the Google Play revenues for apps, they get the search ad revenues, they get to offer you other Google services on the device. Microsoft could conceivably be in the same boat -- they have the Windows app store, Bing and Office and such, so they can monetize Windows phones throughout the whole lifetime of the device. So even if their profits on devices sold are miniscule, they could still be better off in the long run than most Android OEMs.
- untog 11y agoApps is the main reason. Plus it'll be cheaper than developing their own OS. Augment Android with their secure e-mail, BBM, etc and they might have something. Maybe.
- threeseed 11y agoForget about the apps how about the keyboard. There is still a significant number of people who would like a decent phone with a built in keyboard.
- breakingcups 11y agoAndroid supports a hardware keyboard.
- ToniCipriani 11y agoBut how many of those do we see on the market today?
- untog 11y agoVery few, because every time someone tries one sales figures are underwhelming...
- macspoofing 11y ago>Why spend millions on an OS to be at the whim of someone else? Because they can't beat iOS and Android. And they can't out-market and out-spend Microsoft for #3. So what's left?
- on_and_off 11y agoLeaving the OS/hardware market and focus on services.
- AdrianRossouw 11y agoqnx seemed really nifty. I'd been intrigued since the "1.4mb floppy with a full gui" days. it's a pity they couldn't make it work for them.
- jshute 11y agoI can't help but rejoice at the title of this article. I own a BlackBerry Passport and the hardware is phenomenal, but the OS seems designed to put the company out of business. Side-loading APKs is a terrible consumer experience, and as interesting as the Hub concept is, in practice I don't prioritize Foursquare updates the way I prioritize SMS or work email! Gmail and Inbox don't run, Acompli crashes on startup, and Mailbox has unreliable interaction glitches. The Calendar app is frequently outright wrong! The folks saying "another android phone" truly don't get it: the last great keyboard phone was the Droid 4, a slider that's years old and definitely does not have a capacitive keyboard.
- VieElm 11y agoI doubt your Passport will see an Android update even if they did this. Someone might have an unofficial Android build for the Passport though.
- nfoz 11y agoI've run into some small issues, but I my Passport is the best phone I've owned; I'm a convert from Android. I think the hardware and the OS are both fantastic; better UX and more stable than my Google Nexus. Sorry to hear that you have had so many issues, though. I mostly use Hub (primarily text), the fantastic Browser, PDF reader, calls, mobile Hotspot/tethering, and several apps (mostly native).
- mdm_ 11y ago>as interesting as the Hub concept is, in practice I don't prioritize Foursquare updates the way I prioritize SMS or work email! A couple things to try: in the Hub, click the menu button in the bottom right corner "..." and select "Settings". Turn on "Priority Hub" and you'll get an additional folder in the Hub for messages that match your priority criteria. Also, under "Hub Management", you can set each account integrated within the Hub to display notifications exclusively in the main Hub folder, the account-specific folder, or both.
- rbanffy 11y agoI only hope QNX finds a decent home. Maybe open sourced on Github.
- TD-Linux 11y agoI hear tons of praise for QNX here, but how many people have had good experience with it? I've absolutely hated VxWorks personally, and have heard many complaints about QNX as well. Has anyone here used it and liked it more than, e.g. Linux?
- jsolson 11y agoI have used it, and for what it is I like it rather well. If I was in the business of building real-time systems, I would choose it over Linux in a heartbeat.
- rbanffy 11y agoAt the time I learned C on it Minix was brand new and Linux was a distant future. QNX is a rock-solid RTOS. There was, once, a desktop version with a GUI, but I never used it. I may be wrong, but I remember it could boot, compile C code and run vi from a 360k floppy.
- kori-ayakashi 11y agoWhat if Blackberry were to use Sailfish, instead of Android?
- shmerl 11y ago+1 for Sailfish.
- macspoofing 11y agoUsing a niche operating system is their problem.
- threeseed 11y agoExactly. The industry can't sustain multiple operating systems unless there is some way of abstracting the development platforms. Solutions do exist for this but they are generally very poor quality and force a lowest common denominator approach. This is a smart and very overdue decision by Blackberry.
- cwyers 11y agoThey'd be worse off? Blackberry has two problems right now, they don't have any apps so nobody wants to buy their phones, and they don't have any market share so nobody wants to make apps for their phones. And yet. In terms of both market share and app availability, they're better off than Sailfish, or FirefoxOS, or Ubuntu Phone or Tizen. In fact, it probably has more users and more apps than all four of them combined. Switching from their current OS to any of the other alternatives in the marketplace besides Android or maybe Windows Phone is a step BACK for Blackberry, not forward.
- jarboot 11y agoIf they use a heavily-modified, security-focused sort of android marketed toward corporations/government I wouldn't mind it too much. I just hope they don't end up having the same sort of android that every other phones seems to have nowadays.
- rvschuilenburg 11y agoThis is IMO where they will be stuck if they do pursue this road: There's no way Google will allow the Play Store on such a heavily modified android (look at the Amazon Fire for example, with Amazon's custom Android). So in the end they'll end up with an OS that can run Android apps, but doesn't support the Google ecosystem. But they already have that. It's called BBOS10 and has the Android runtime and the Amazon AppStore.
- neverminder 11y agoWhy not Firefox OS or Ubuntu?
- nfoz 11y agoWhy not BB OS?
- nfoz 11y agoI understand the competitive pressures that drive us down to only a very small number of choices in the market (e.g. iphone or android, windows or mac). What I don't understand is why so many consumers seem to want that outcome.
- threeseed 11y agoThey don't want the outcome. It's the result of the network effect. App developers simply can't afford or are capable of maintaining a separate code base for each OS. Especially when each OS requires very difficult skill sets.
- wooyi 11y agoMost of the comments here are focusing on the OS. It's not about the OS. It's about the ecosystem - the apps marketplace. They can come up with a great OS, like Windows did, but without the ecosystem, consumers will not use it. A smartphone without apps is a dumb phone.
- rvschuilenburg 11y agoBut BB10 already supports the ecosystem. They have an Android runtime and it ships with the Amazon AppStore.
- smegel 11y agoAnd Blackberry as everything else? Lucky no one has thought of being an independent Android vendor before, the field is almost open!
- Shorel 11y agoIt would be at least interesting if it was Ubuntu Touch instead of yet another generic android phone.