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Comment by p_l | Hacker News Reader

Blackberry was always the weird one out that effectively depended on special service from your provider combined with special tariffs for using them. This is a legacy from when they were explicitly enterprise devices and you couldn't exactly buy them normally.

Similarly, the core functionality of the original BB - email - is no longer supported (though you can probably run it still) because the special server software (BB didn't run normal email originally) was withdrawn. This special server communicated with your phone provider IIRC to handle BB-only special features like email (back when GPRS was barely starting)

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Note that this only applies to the older BlackBerry OS (7 and earlier) phones, which used the BES. BB10 and later Android phones worked and will continue to work like any other phone.

The Z10 and Q10 were the first BB10 phones in 2013, and I believe BlackBerry only produced one more BBOS phone after that. After the Classic and Passport in late 2014, BlackBerry switched to Android with the Priv, KeyOne, and Key2 and essentially abandoned the BB10 OS and phones.

> essentially abandoned the BB10 OS and phones.

A terrible shame. I used a BB10 and built a couple toy apps for it, but it was difficult to publish them from Brazil (and the market was, sadly, tiny). It was easier if you developed for Android, but still you’d need older APIs.

QNX is an amazing OS, a work of art. I learned C (and vi!) on it in the late 80s and it’s up there with zOS, and Solaris as my favourite proprietary OSs.

To add some more detail from when I worked there: We had two users which were BES and BIS. Not all devices were connected to an enterprise. Consumer-owned devices were almost always provisioned using BIS. They tried to later push Black Berry ID as a way to get users to take over some half-baked control but that was a total flop. The support overhead was simply too much.

I believe this impacts BB10 as well. So my beloved Z30 will no longer work.

It does not impact any of the BB branded Android phones though.

Even today some apps like Outlook for Android use Microsoft servers for proxyiing email service and don't connect directly to the mail servers from the phone.

Outlook for Android goes a bit differently (depends on your Exchange setup).

In case of BB, it was literally a special protocol running on the telco network, combined with the special rates, to enable live email access when GPRS was, well, new and mostly unavailable.

> Blackberry was always the weird one out that effectively depended on special service from your provider

Yes, service books they were called.

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