
Blackberry might switch to Android as OS - hoare
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/06/11/us-blackberry-google-android-idUSKBN0OR2ZM20150611
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heimatau
I 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.

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Justin_K
They 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.

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cwyers
Stop making phones altogether. Focus on what they do well -- BBM and MDM
solutions. Being an Android OEM is death by slow cuts at this point. Players
who have a much bigger head start in making Android handsets are doing poorly.
Even the big "winners" like Samsung are selling a lot of units at low margins.
What's Blackberry got that every other Android vender doesn't? Don't say
keyboards, Motorola's first Droid had a keyboard, there's a reason they
haven't made a new keyboard phone since 2012. And those are slider keyboards
-- nobody is making Android apps optimized for the screen size and ratio of a
classic style Blackberry. Making Android devices would be throwing good money
after bad.

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UnoriginalGuy
A lot of people really hated BBM and are happy to see the back of it. It was
hard to manage as an internal service, and a massive privacy concern as a
cloud one. MDM is very competitive if they're going to be an Android vendor,
why would someone pay Blackberry when there are tons of competitors already in
that enterprise space and already offering top notch MDM?

The problem is that back when Blackberry were big they had few competitors.
BBM was one of the few services which could be used internal-only, and MDM was
non-existent on most other vendors or operating systems.

Sorry, but to my eyes, if Blackberry made this their business then they would
go out of business. A lot of the people who used to have the displeasure of
managing this stuff don't want it back, and they will fight tooth and nail to
keep that from happening.

I've literally seen wine opened when BES was removed once and for all.

PS - We no longer do MDM since users BYOD, all we have the ability to do is
remove the company's Exchange archive (like deleting a PST on a PC). Plus it
is encrypted anyway, so if they cannot login then they cannot review it.

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jfb
Blackberry will be out of business soon regardless of what they do.

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cwyers
Pretty much. Throwing what little money they have at trying to sell commodity
phones just hastens that outcome.

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rbanffy
I only hope QNX finds a decent home. Maybe open sourced on Github.

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TD-Linux
I 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?

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jsolson
I 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.

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jshute
I 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.

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nfoz
I'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).

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kori-ayakashi
What if Blackberry were to use Sailfish, instead of Android?

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macspoofing
Using a niche operating system is their problem.

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threeseed
Exactly. 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.

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wooyi
Most 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.

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rvschuilenburg
But BB10 already supports the ecosystem. They have an Android runtime and it
ships with the Amazon AppStore.

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jarboot
If 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.

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rvschuilenburg
This 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.

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nfoz
I 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.

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threeseed
They 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.

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AdrianRossouw
qnx 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.

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smegel
And Blackberry as everything else? Lucky no one has thought of being an
independent Android vendor before, the field is almost open!

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Shorel
It would be at least interesting if it was Ubuntu Touch instead of yet another
generic android phone.

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neverminder
Why not Firefox OS or Ubuntu?

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nfoz
Why not BB OS?

