Blackberry might switch to Android as OS | Hacker News Reader

Blackberry might switch to Android as OS

reuters.com

41 pointshoare64 comments

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.

They will selling yet another Android phone, and that isn't good for margins.

They 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.

I wonder if they could create their own android app market that had a more rigorous audit process.

Those 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)

If they manage to sell an up-to-date Android device with a keyboard, there's a substantial market of people who want one.

Is there?

I 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.

Android 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.

Blackberry'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.

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.

Why HA? Have you used it?

I'm pretty sure most people would agree their OS is inferior.

In 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

You 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.

Company 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

Inferior as an android competitor perhaps but as an OS for soft real time, or embedded or secure systems, QNX is extremely good.

I switched from Android to Blackberry because I consider the OS superior. To each their own, I suppose.

I'm not the parent poster, but it is hard enough to find a similar Android app, let alone build your own ecosystem. Pairing with Google should have been an early move—it is what I would have done immediately—announce that new RIM tech will be more secure than ever, but with more apps than ever. (Yes, tech folks would shake their heads, but that doesn't matter)

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.

FYI BlackBerry is releasing a 16x9 slider phone later this year, which has fed into the Android rumors. The only glimpse BlackBerry fans have seen of that device so far looked like a Galaxy S6 Edge with a slide-out keyboard.

I wish Blackberry had a strong data firewall between Android apps and QNX apps.

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.

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

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

My plan was indirect but they should refine their OS. Heck they could even partner with Microsoft to allow portability. But the moment they give up their OS is the moment they are throwing in the towel, for mobile.

Works pretty well for a ton of other vendors.

Hmm, are any of the handset manufacturers making profit? I think Samsung's phone division is losing money.

Other than Apple, no, not really. It's a commodity business and those are tough.

Not 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%.

You'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-ap...

That article is over 2 years old. The numbers have changed, in apples favor: http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/26/apple-eating-all-the-profit...

I 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.

Apps 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.

Forget 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.

Android supports a hardware keyboard.

But how many of those do we see on the market today?

Very few, because every time someone tries one sales figures are underwhelming...

>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?

Leaving the OS/hardware market and focus on services.

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

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?

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.

At 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.

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.

I doubt your Passport will see an Android update even if they did this. Someone might have an unofficial Android build for the Passport though.

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).

>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.

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

+1 for Sailfish.

Using a niche operating system is their problem.

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.

They'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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Why not Firefox OS or Ubuntu?

Why not BB OS?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com