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Lemme preface this since I'm new here by saying I've got 3 years of a comp sci degree, 2 years of a comp engineering degree, worked a bit on mips machines a decade ago, and dropped out of college to run my own software company (and not an appity app company, but a real x86 software company). So I know a bit about engineering complex systems and running a software business. I will also add, I am not completely familiar with QNX or BB10, as I typically use *BSD and a dumb phone until recently (chained to my desk 16 hours a day...)
TLDR: BB10 is dead outside of "maybe" 10.3.4 and future minor security updates. Android API Emulation won't save it, even if it could happen. If you must have an alternative modern OS, Sailfish. Otherwise, it won't hurt you to keep using BB10 if it serves your needs. Hell, I used Windows CE in my PDA for 15 years...
I will break this post down into three categories, 1) Technical, 2) Business, 3) If/Only Future.
1) Technical
I'm not greatly informed with QNX or BB10, but I do know Unix systems quite well. The statement by Troy Tiscareno, "But BB10 isn't merely a UI. QNX doesn't have by itself ANY smartphone-related functionality except for the most basic file structure." is certainly true, but a following sentence in that paragraph, " All of that was newly created for BB10, and is unique to BB10." is only half true.
I would imagine that much of the functionality created for BB10 is reused in other products. There is no point in writing two graphical servers for phones and car infotainment systems. Ditto with the handling of blue tooth protocols, GPS, UI APIS ports (QT4/QT5) etc. The implementation of many of these things have no reason to change, and QNX is a POSIX which means porting them to other version of the OS isn't that difficult if much of the non POSIX code has not greatly changed.
QNX 7 is 64bit, but even porting to 64bit is not that difficult. And while QNX is a microkernel, so changes in the kernel API can break processes, that's what shims are for.
So updating BB10 to QNX7 base (and thus 64bit) would not be as much work as writing BB10 in the first place. Kernel, Userland, core programs and protocols, are already written. The only remaining bottlenecks would be porting any poorly written low level 32bit programs/api's, and the big one of writing drivers for an unsupported platform. (Although a fuschiaOS driver shim much like we do with Linux drivers in FreeBSD would be quite interesting fix to this problem.)
But all of that is moot because:
2) Business
A good OS software engineer costs about $100,000/year in just salary. Around $250,000/year including overhead (health insurance, paperwork, coffee, etc). Senior engineers more, JR engineers less. And the low level expertise isn't quite something you can outsource to India.
Roughly every 4 engineers need's a QA, and every 10 employees needs a mid level manager. Just maintaining BB10 with security updates and bug fixes (10.3.3/10.3.4), with a 6 man team (4 devs, 1QA,1 Manager) is probably costing BB around $1.25m per year. (Although I wouldn't be surprised if it's just a couple of interns/jr level programmers and a manager who splits duties with another project.)
Lets say someone is interested in licensing BB10. And they're willing to pay a generous rate of $10 per phone. They would still need to sell 125,000 phones (Half of BB Passport's launch, 10-20% of Google Pixel's launch) just to have BB breakeven on MAINTAINING BB10.
The problem is,
1) No one is going to want to license an OS that is just in maintenance mode.
2) The phone company would have to pay BB to write drivers, or increase licensing fee. (BB financial problems would mean the former, upfront fee, would be required.) A 30 man team to write drivers would cost an additional $7.5million/year. And finally the big one
3) Phones are a race to the bottom. Google and Apple make their money from their app stores. Third party vendors license Android for practically free. The hypothetical $10 licensing fee from our phone company to get BB10 is $10 that other companies can undercut them, or $10 additional margins to their already low margins.
Issue #1 can only be solved by spending more money. But that would require higher fees or more phones sold, which increases the problem with #3 .
To solve #3 , BB would have to license BB10 for free. But sadly for BB10's future, it's too late to do that because there is no app support. They should have done this at launch. And without app developers, you have no sales on BB world, which causes money issues to deal with #1 .
All of that avoids the fact that BB10 is 32bit, and there are (to my knowledge) no more mainstream modern 32bit SOCs. So throw another 110 man team ($27.5million/year, 80 Developers, 20 QAs, 10 Managers) at porting the software that hasn't already been ported to QNX 7, write drivers, etc. Before anyone would consider using it. (Disregarding problem #3 above.)
This leaves out the Android situation. Which to my knowledge would require a complete rewrite as android's 4.4 API is a move to a native code from a virtual machine. Which would require a complete clone of the API (rather than just running the VM like we do now) to be written for QNX ARM. Another few million dollars...
3) The Future.
The only chances for a future BB Phone OS is not with BB10, but a BB11. However, this is very unlikely to happen. It would require 4 things to happen:
1) BlackBerry Android would have to be so popular that BB doesn't abandon the mobile market, and they make a crap ton of money to work on other projects.
2) Not wanting to be tied to Google's leash they create their own OS as a backup plan (like Samsung's Tizen). Rather than just following Google into it's future endeavors like FuchsiaOS.
3) BlackBerry expands into other markets, like SmartTVs, with this "BB11" OS, like LG's WebOS, and Tizen.
4) Someone is willing to license BB11 for their phones. (Only way for BB to interest anyone in this is to license it for free and find app developers.)
All four of those are so far fetched it won't happen.
*PS Alcohol may have made this post a little rambling and incoherent.Last edited by BronzeBeard; 06-15-17 at 12:54 AM.
06-15-17 12:28 AM - I was compiling, so I really didn't have anything better to do while I waited on my work.
If a 64-bit SoC can't run 32-bit OSs with equivalent or better performance than on the previous generation 32-bit SoC then this not feasible at all, because the idea is to survey available devices on the market and pick one to run BB10. This is also a way for BlackBerry to fulfill their promise of a 10.3.4 and an attempt to keep the remaining BB10 developers developing for the platform. What you didn't include is cost of the loss of goodwill and if this approach would be too costly to regain it.Last edited by DonHB; 06-15-17 at 03:26 PM.
06-15-17 03:13 PM - It is true that most ARMv8A chips can handle 32bit ARMv7 OS like BB10, but it does not remove the need to write new drivers for the non-cpu related parts of the SOC. Drivers for GPU, Bluetooth, Quickcharge, Wifi, etc all need to be rewritten (or ported over) anytime there is chipset changes. Like it or not, this costs money.If a 64-bit SoC can't run 32-bit OSs with equivalent or better performance than on the previous generation 32-bit SoC then this not feasible at all,
That being said, I'm sure Qualcomm will still sell you SoC that BB10 already has driver support for if you wanted to make a low-mid range phone. Likewise, you can dump all that you want into making BB10 run on the fastest SoC out there. It wouldn't matter, because the issue with BB10 isn't technical, and it isn't hardware. It's money.
Google Play Service license fee is around $1/phone. If BB10 is going to try to match that with licensing fees, they would need a significant amount of app sales to cover costs. But you need to sell devices for app developers to make apps. Remember, it's $250,000 per programmer. That's 250,000 phones sold per programmer per year at google rates, not including app sales.
No phone company is going to risk a BB10 device, when OEMs can pay google $1/phone and have access to the largest, most popular mobile OS out there. Even if someone where to risk it, how well will they sell? If I recall only 600,000 BB were sold in Q4 2015. If a third party vendor put up those numbers licensing BB10 for $1, it would barely be enough to have 8 engineers working on it over a year. Which means you still have a dead OS. And with a dead OS, you're not going to get those sales in the first place.
BB10 missed its mark at the start. I imagine they were asking vendors to pay licensing fee for the OS, when in reality, they should have just given it out for free to anyone wanting to make low cost phones. Thus no one but BB was using BB10. By aiming at the high and middle-high business ranges, they shot themselves in the foot with consumer app support.
With the announcement of no new features to BB10, BlackBerry killed off any last chances of a small vendor making a cheap phone in markets where BB still holds some marketshare. Again, it's doubtful that the number of units sold would have been enough to support development anyway.
I personally believe there will be a 10.3.4, but it won't be out till end of the year. Two year support is an industry standard, and the last BB10 devices sold at full price where in 2016... I would imagine it's not being worked on by crack programmers. It's the perfect kind of side project for interns and Jr level programmers to work on, with one or two SR level programmers splitting duties to manage it. That's how you rise up in the ranks in such companies.The promise was support to the end of 2016. The expectation was that it would take two updates to get there. Turns out 10.3.3 was delayed until the end of 2016. Therefore, we will not see 10.3.4.
A 10.3.4 will fix a couple performance regressions in 10.3.3 and some little security issues. That's it. Cross your fingers they don't break more stuff like the 10.3.3 update... After that, the platform will be maintained much like Opera Presto. If a critical CVE is released, they'll patch it and send out the update. No more, no less.
Anyhoo, now I gotta figure out how to disable this email me if someone quotes me thing... So I'm not bothered by this thread anymore.06-15-17 05:07 PM - If each generation of SoC is as incompatible as you describe with the last then any possibility even using existing on market devices will depend upon what drivers QNX already has or will have in their cache of IP.It is true that most ARMv8A chips can handle 32bit ARMv7 OS like BB10, but it does not remove the need to write new drivers for the non-cpu related parts of the SOC. Drivers for GPU, Bluetooth, Quickcharge, Wifi, etc all need to be rewritten (or ported over) anytime there is chipset changes. Like it or not, this costs money. ...
Anyhoo, now I gotta figure out how to disable this email me if someone quotes me thing... So I'm not bothered by this thread anymore.
It is tough to find information regarding compatibility between generations of Snapdragon from Qualcomm. If you haven't disabled your quotes email can you point the way?06-15-17 06:48 PM
[Wishful thinking] Blackberry OS will be continuing after all.
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