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Comment by hvs | Hacker News Reader

That's not what he says:

  Unlike BlackBerry, which allows iPhone users to download and
  use our BBM service, Apple does not allow BlackBerry or 
  Android users to download Apple’s iMessage messaging 
  service. Netflix, which has forcefully advocated for carrier 
  neutrality, has discriminated against BlackBerry customers
  by refusing to make its streaming movie service available 
  to them.

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His phrasing is clumsy because hes not a programmer. The issue is that its rather "impossible" to create BB apps for some services because they're locked down. If NetFlix and Apple were to open the API, that would be enough for anyone (including BB employees) to create the app themselves. I don't think BB is so poor that they couldn't hire a few devs to get the apps written.

Netflix and Apple don't have to open up anything if they don't want to. It's their service and ultimately they can choose which platforms to support. This is just whining from BlackBerry.

>It's their service and ultimately they can choose which platforms to support.

I think you're thoroughly confused. A documented protocol can be implemented on any general purpose platform.

Remember the binary document formats from Microsoft? People had to reverse engineer that shit once upon a time. Not anymore, its all XML now. Microsoft didn't have to "support" Linux. They merely had to document their format. Certainly, OOXML has its own problems but these days almost ANY service/application can read/write MS document formats.

What are you going on about? Apple and Netflix offer a service, not a protocol that should be used by everyone. They decide which platform to support — this isn't about any protocol.

So his position seems to be that either these services should provide native clients for these platforms, or else they should expose APIs to let third-party developers create native clients.

That's still not a position I'm comfortable with. (I wish everybody exposed APIs to third-party clients, but I understand how hard that can be.) On the other hand, it's a lot more reasonable than unconditionally forcing devs to port their apps over.

Well, his actual letter doesn't mention the phrase "API," so reading such a request into it seems like a stretch: http://blogs.blackberry.com/2015/01/blackberry-net-neutralit...

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