BlackBerry may have the perfect opportunity to produce a Canadian made cellphone to compet with Apple and other America brands.
BlackBerry may have the perfect opportunity to produce a Canadian made cellphone to compet with Apple and other America brands.
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Not going to happen. Not for a long time. As much as we would want it to.
The phone market is brutally, viciously competitive and an outsider trying to jump in without Android or iOS is almost guaranteed to fail. We used to have numerous options from all kinds of companies that came with a variety of operating systems but each one fell to the duopoly.
People are glued to their phones and social media more than ever. I would expect an attempt to get them to move to a non-American mobile operating system and phone would fail very quickly. Blackberry did used to make their own line of phones that ran BB10 and they were excellent. Nobody bought them though, or at least not enough to justify their continued production. Even fewer bought the following Android-powered BB phones and eventually Blackberry pulled out of the market. The same story for Windows mobile phones.
There are plenty of options for non-American cellphones and I'm sure in the coming years we will see Canadian ones too. The problem is that they will almost certainly run Android which means American control over your data and feeds. Getting Canadians to accept a sacrifice in short-term phone functionality to regain digital freedom in the long run is a tall order.
I think the problem is that many companies, if they don't see a path to monopoly or near monopoly, cash out and close shop.
For example Fairphone has been going for 12 years. There's no reason BlackBerry couldn't make a basic phone running Lineage and stick to a tiny profitable market share.
Capitalism requires companies to constantly grow or they risk being taken over either by being purchased or out-competed in the market by it's competitors to the point where they cant sustain. It forces them to try to monoplise just to survive.
Ive been looking at the Fairphone as my next phone for some time now. My only concern is how long they intend to sell replacement parts for. I do not see any parts for fairphone 1 or 2 parts for sale. And currently in America only fairphone 3 is for sale. My concern is if I buy it how long it will be before the 3rd model's parts are no longer available.
(Unrelated: Is your username a King Gizzard reference?)
Companies do not have to chase increased profits. That's a choice. Genda Shigyō has been making paper products for over 1,200 years.
It doesn't matter if other companies grow larger than your company as long as you make a profit.
They could stick to a tiny market share but not a profitable one.
The problem is you need a large team of developers for the operating system and designers and engineers for the hardware. This means thousands of employees. Do you know many phones you have to sell to pay the salaries of 2000+ employees? At least a million phones a year at a gross profit (retail price minus total cost of manufacturing) of $200 per phone.
FairPhone just makes Android phones, so they don’t have the cost of developing their own operating system. The OS is the real killer app. It’s why iOS and Android are so dominant. It requires billions of dollars in investment to be competitive.
You don't need thousands of employees. The Lineage group provides the os. It need only be customized. LineageOS itself is 9 developers working part time as a hobby.
Hardware design is typically 3-5 people with 10 support staff. I've worked for a couple hardware startups.
LineageOS is Android. If you use that then you’re not competing with Android, you’re joining it. The OP wants BlackBerry to provide an alternative to iOS and Android.
We’re not talking about hardware startups trying to build a minimum viable product, we’re talking about a company trying to market a product to regular consumers.
BlackBerry had a successful consumer product prior to the launch of the iPhone. Since then, the bar has been raised to the stratosphere and BlackBerry no longer comes even close. With thousands of employees they couldn’t do it.
Android runs on Linux. That doesn't make you Google. There's no reason to reinvent the wheel.
We’re not talking about hardware startups trying to build a minimum viable product,
I once worked for a publicly traded company. It was a few guys doing the custom Asics, one guy doing the board layout and two guys doing the software. This wasn't a minimum viable product. It was a commercial product used by every large bank in the world.
Have you heard of Micronics motherboards? I knew the person who did their first motherboard. It was one person.
They had a working qnx phone that ran Android apps, but google didn’t let them run some essential services and store support was awful.
It was a good attempt though. Bb app devs were getting paid a lot better than Apple/android/microsoft because the apps could be priced higher. It’s the “free” apps that were a problem.
Netflix actively declined 2 full time devs paid for by BlackBerry to build and maintain an app. They weren’t going to get any additional subs from Netflix on qnx, it was just going to be a development boat anchor.
I still have my red bb passport and to this day still think it was the best mobile phone ever made.
All they'd need to do is have compatibility with android apps, and make it easy to access them.
they had actualy done this whith some android emulation on it. But in the end peoplea wanted android.
Different world now.
While I wouldn't be all hyped that BlackBerry was the new third option as opposed to a fully open source third option, it would at least be a third option, and I'd take it, assuming some degree of reasonable control over the devices. BlackBerry at least would take a few years to reach peak enshittification, giving something like Linux more time to reach parity in features and stability.
I think forking android could be viable if they put some weight behind it
The difference between this and fireOS is they're almost guaranteed sales. No foreign government is going to stick with an American company if they have a comparable option from a reliable ally at this point... That's got to be hundreds of millions of sales on that front alone
If they can make something good, polish it for a few years, and demonstrate they can lock it down that's almost guaranteed sales. And if they use that opportunity to further improve for a couple generations, they could become a real contender
The only question is will they throw enough resources at it and will they stick with improving it without giving up too early