[EFats]

You can't assume that every connection is necessarily nefarious in nature.

We live in a hyper-connected and distributed world where resources aren't always local.

Of course not. When I have an app that is designed to present me news, then sure, it has a reason to be connected once in a while. Or an email app. Or apps which sync my data to the cloud.

When Youtube official app, which I have never used on this phone, and I never upload any videos, and is not currently supposed to be running, decides to wake up and connect, what would you surmise would be a reason for it to do this? It's not the only guilty app, of course. There are plenty of apps which are NOT network apps (e.g. Non-synced notes or to-do's) which do the same thing.

Not only that, analyze the list of apps that have known trackers. Plenty of them have Facebook tracker even though the app itself has nothing to do with FB.
(If you don't believe me, look for the recent news regarding apps that sent telemetry to FB on startup, there was a bit of a kerfuffle over that being revealed)



Posted via CB10

[conite]

Of course not. When I have an app that is designed to present me news, then sure, it has a reason to be connected once in a while. Or an email app. Or apps which sync my data to the cloud.

When Youtube official app, which I have never used on this phone, and I never upload any videos, and is not currently supposed to be running, decides to wake up and connect, what would you surmise would be a reason for it to do this? It's not the only guilty app, of course. There are plenty of apps which are NOT network apps (e.g. Non-synced notes or to-do's) which do the same thing.

Not only that, analyze the list of apps that have known trackers. Plenty of them have Facebook tracker even though the app itself has nothing to do with FB.
(If you don't believe me, look for the recent news regarding apps that sent telemetry to FB on startup, there was a bit of a kerfuffle over that being revealed)



Posted via CB10

I agree with all of this. I'm just pointing out that, even with directed ads (which make many services possible in the first place) the intent isn't to serve you up to the highest bidder or to bring you down via extortion.

Companies have revenue models, and we are all participants if we choose to use their apps.

[EFats]

I agree with all of this. I'm just pointing out that, even with directed ads (which make many services possible in the first place) the intent isn't to serve you up to the highest bidder or to bring you down via extortion.

Companies have revenue models, and we are all participants if we choose to use their apps.

Yes, of course. I have no problems with ads or even data slurping in general. People have to pay their bills one way or another.

But what I do have a problem with is not being upfront about it. If you're not doing anything nefarious then just come out and say so. "We will collect this data from you.... and periodically send it back to our servers. We will then sell your data to other people in order to make money"

I shouldn't have to dig around and use 'special' tools to figure out what data you are sending to who.

It's not that hard. Most web sites have gone this route already with the "We use cookies..." warning.

Posted via CB10

[Leyra B10]

Yes, of course. I have no problems with ads or even data slurping in general. People have to pay their bills one way or another.

But what I do have a problem with is not being upfront about it. If you're not doing anything nefarious then just come out and say so. "We will collect this data from you.... and periodically send it back to our servers. We will then sell your data to other people in order to make money"

I shouldn't have to dig around and use 'special' tools to figure out what data you are sending to who.

It's not that hard. Most web sites have gone this route already with the "We use cookies..." warning.

Posted via CB10

Thats fair, on occasion Ive saved a web page and the files included go a few directories deep. Thats crazy, probably slowing you down too.

Posted via CB10

[Gazza12]

I really don't understand even forgive what Blackberry management board did.

For most persons, we only need several common applications. I promise you, less than 20 apps in your Android or Iphone if you count, I mean the applications that you use often. No matter there are millions applications in Google play or Appstore, most of them are rubbish or as same as rubbish because you don't really need them.

So the question is why BlackBerry can't focus on these most common applications. I don't believe that a company like BlackBerry can't handle well these applications if the CEO really cares about BlackBerry mobile device.

BB10 is a good operating system even though it is not perfect sometimes. But I love its simplicity and efficiency. Probably I will buy a key2 or key3 when my passport is striking. I will miss my Passport, Classic, Q10 and my happy memories.

Posted via my favorite BlackBerry Passport.

You have to feel sorry for BB in terms of timing. The wheel has all but fully turned in terms of security (or lack thereof) and apps.
Remember the app craze 5 or 6 years ago? Millionaires were made overnight by launching trendy apps that lasted a month if you're lucky. The only apps I use now are proprietary such as banking some airlines etc etc. They work fine with Cobalt's help.

Apparently app downloads continues to trend down from its eye watering highs.

Yes I too am hanging on to my Passport.....my 3rd......because I simply love the phone and BB10. It serves its purpose like all BlackBerrys before it...as one YouTuber put beautifully.....it gets sh* t done.
Of course as mentioned by others the browser is now in trouble as is my battery. My "new" PP has obviously been sitting on a warehouse shelf for 3 years or so and the battery is not lasting the 2 days.

I also love the reaction from folk who think its a new phone! They love it.

Like so many others I dream of a BB resurrection. Ahhhhhhhhhhh!!

I suppose there's about as much chance of that as any other resurrection.............

[Doctornoc]

Their biggest mistake was greenlighting it in the first place.

Enough with this failure of an OS and time to look at the future, as BB Android devices are the ONLY ones that are not just another piece of glass.

BB10 wasn't a mistake. Failure of management was the mistake. No marketing, no advertising, no BIS. They left their user base behind.

Posted via CB10

[Chuck Finley69]

BB10 wasn't a mistake. Failure of management was the mistake. No marketing, no advertising, no BIS. They left their user base behind.

Posted via CB10

Hindsight tells us BB10 was a mistake of epic proportions. The behavior of BB executives with the delayed introduction of BB10 tells us even they knew it was a mistake of epic proportions beforehand for a multitude of reasons. NO alternative for BIS monthly revenue was the biggest problem for BlackBerry at time. However, BlackBerry not having the economic resources of Apple, Google or Microsoft at no time in their evolutionary history meant that company was doomed from the beginning in mobile hardware. BlackBerry was always supposed to be just an enterprise partner. Their business model shows that’s how their infrastructure was built.

[bdeviprasad]

I am a BlackBerry Passport fan and I join you in all that regaling and whining.

Posted via CB10

[bansheeboyz]

I'm a BB10 fan but in all honesty it was a mistake, looking back bb7 was better just not modern. As great as the passport is what was the purpose of that phone with that form factor

[poetlocked007]

You sound like me! I use my passport as my daily and carry my iPod to fulfill the apps angst! And I’m 😊

[Doctornoc]

I'm a BB10 fan but in all honesty it was a mistake, looking back bb7 was better just not modern. As great as the passport is what was the purpose of that phone with that form factor

If BB10 had the strengths of BB7 it would have done better.BB7 murdered BB10 when it came to services and ecosystem.

Posted via CB10

[BurningPlatform]

Hindsight tells us BB10 was a mistake of epic proportions.

No, it wasn't. Technically, it was the best mobile OS on the market. Just incomparably better than (at the time) unstable, messy and ugly Android. A few small things could have changed everything.

First of all, if not that huge delay, if BB10 came out as planned (i.e. about a year earlier) it would have been the platform that hundreds of millions (yes, hundreds of millions) of Symbian users (and a few million of Maemo/MeeGo users) would have switched to.

I do know what I am saying, because I used to run the oldest and one of the biggest Symbian community website where I had some ~150.000 registered forum members (and countless guests) from around the world and up to 2 million unique visits a month, which at that time was really something (in its best times the site ranked in Alexa at about 5000-6000th location in the Internet when it comes to visits). The site was Symbian's official affiliate partner, the (only) winner of Nokia/S60 Consortium's Evangelist award for promoting Symbian to the general public, etc. With such a huge user base, I do know what Symbian users wanted at that time.

Starting from late 2011 all Symbian (40% marketshare) users where desperately looking for an alternative to their quickly dying platform finished off by Elop. I still remember how the first BB10 OS screenshots and news about its gesture-driven UI, multitasking, etc. appeared and made all Symbian users **** their pants that a PROPER REPLACEMENT for Symbian and MeeGo was coming, closely (much more than any other) resembling features of those Nokia OSes. Tens of thousands of Symbian/MeeGo developers (myself included) were extremely happy, too, because BB10 was based on Qt, just like Symbian and MeeGo, so porting apps to it was trivial, a matter of literally hours. My first couple of BB10 apps were ported from Symbian within one day.

People waited and waited for BB10 to come out, and eventually most of them had to go Android (as it was no longer possible to keep using the dead Symbian platform), which turned out to be the only (not really exciting) choice, as dumb iOS and even dumber Windows Phone weren't an option for majority of them.

That's why Android marketshare suddenly grew by some 30% in around 2012. It could (and would!) have been BB10 instead, if it only came out in early-to-mid 2012, and not mid 2013 when it was much too late because majority of Symbian users had already been forced to switch. Same for developers, who waited and waited and most of them went Android or iOS during 2012 as they couldn't live any longer without any revenue. And once they switched and made the huge effort to learn the new APIs and environment, they didn't bother to go back.

That single delay changed EVERYTHING. So maybe instead of blowing billions then on trying to sell it when there wasn't anyone left to buy it, BlackBerry should have invested 10% of it into bringing BB10 to the market in time, when hundreds of millions of people were just looking for a new platform to switch to.

And even then, marketing was next to none. Even if sometimes an average customer could hear something about BB10 then it was not much besides that it's a platform that "can run Android apps". Which was something that just COULDN'T have made anyone interested, because to run Android apps everyone considered a "genuine" Android device a proper option.

So if something was a "mistake of epic proportions" then it was not BB10 itself but the way it was brought to the market. If it happened as planned, it would have been perfectly aligned with one in a million fantastic opportunity that at the very same time one of the biggest smartphone platform in the world was killed and hundreds of millions of its users were just then deserately looking for an alternative and very eager to try BB10 as it was the closest thing to Symbian they could get. Wasting such an unbelievable opportunity was the biggest failure they could have made. And they did it.

This forum is full of statements from its "Trusted Members" and "Ambassadors" like that e.g. "BlackBerry blew billions on BB10" or that "BlackBerry always wanted to license BB10 but they weren't any takers".

What kind of arguments are those? NASA also blew billions on space flights, and then came Elon Musk and does same thing cheaper and better, making exact same thing profitable rather than subsidized by millions of tax payers. So it's a matter of HOW YOU DO IT and not how much money you throw at it. There weren't any BB10 licence takers? So maybe the conditions were ****ty, compared to Android they could get instead? Maybe it took making them just as good, at least initially, to attract anyone?

Comparisons to Windows phones? Two completely different reasons. Only Windows 10 became really usable, but too late. Windows Phone 7 and 7.5 were a functional DISASTER, Windows Phone 8 a bit better. Even Microsoft's billions weren't able to make people buy such a crappy OS when there were much better alternatives. Not only now, but the very same thing happened with their previous attempt 10 years earlier when their "Microsoft Smartphone" platform just couldn't compete with Symbian and even eating British phone maker Sendo didn't help them. Nothing to do with BB10's outstanding quality, about which NO ONE KNEW A THING.

[conite]

No, it wasn't. Technically, it was the best mobile OS on the market. Just incomparably better than (at the time) unstable, messy and ugly Android. A few small things could have changed everything.

First of all, if not that huge delay, if BB10 came out as planned (i.e. about a year earlier) it would have been the platform that hundreds of millions (yes, hundreds of millions) of Symbian users (and a few million of Maemo/MeeGo users) would have switched to.

I do know what I am saying, because I used to run the oldest and one of the biggest Symbian community website where I had some ~150.000 registered forum members (and countless guests) from around the world and up to 2 million unique visits a month, which at that time was really something (in its best times the site ranked in Alexa at about 5000-6000th location in the Internet when it comes to visits). The site was Symbian's official affiliate partner, the (only) winner of Nokia/S60 Consortium's Evangelist award for promoting Symbian to the general public, etc. With such a huge user base, I do know what Symbian users wanted at that time.

Starting from late 2011 all Symbian (40% marketshare) users where desperately looking for an alternative to their quickly dying platform finished off by Elop. I still remember how the first BB10 OS screenshots and news about its gesture-driven UI, multitasking, etc. appeared and made all Symbian users **** their pants that a PROPER REPLACEMENT for Symbian and MeeGo was coming, closely (much more than any other) resembling features of those Nokia OSes. Tens of thousands of Symbian/MeeGo developers (myself included) were extremely happy, too, because BB10 was based on Qt, just like Symbian and MeeGo, so porting apps to it was trivial, a matter of literally hours. My first couple of BB10 apps were ported from Symbian within one day.

People waited and waited for BB10 to come out, and eventually most of them had to go Android (as it was no longer possible to keep using the dead Symbian platform), which turned out to be the only (not really exciting) choice, as dumb iOS and even dumber Windows Phone weren't an option for majority of them.

That's why Android marketshare suddenly grew by some 30% in around 2012. It could (and would!) have been BB10 instead, if it only came out in early-to-mid 2012, and not mid 2013 when it was much too late because majority of Symbian users had already been forced to switch. Same for developers, who waited and waited and most of them went Android or iOS during 2012 as they couldn't live any longer without any revenue. And once they switched and made the huge effort to learn the new APIs and environment, they didn't bother to go back.

That single delay changed EVERYTHING. So maybe instead of blowing billions then on trying to sell it when there wasn't anyone left to buy it, BlackBerry should have invested 10% of it into bringing BB10 to the market in time, when hundreds of millions of people were just looking for a new platform to switch to.

And even then, marketing was next to none. Even if sometimes an average customer could hear something about BB10 then it was not much besides that it's a platform that "can run Android apps". Which was something that just COULDN'T have made anyone interested, because to run Android apps everyone considered a "genuine" Android device a proper option.

So if something was a "mistake of epic proportions" then it was not BB10 itself but the way it was brought to the market. If it happened as planned, it would have been perfectly aligned with one in a million fantastic opportunity that at the very same time one of the biggest smartphone platform in the world was killed and hundreds of millions of its users were just then deserately looking for an alternative and very eager to try BB10 as it was the closest thing to Symbian they could get. Wasting such an unbelievable opportunity was the biggest failure they could have made. And they did it.

This forum is full of statements from its "Trusted Members" and "Ambassadors" like that e.g. "BlackBerry blew billions on BB10" or that "BlackBerry always wanted to license BB10 but they weren't any takers".

What kind of arguments are those? NASA also blew billions on space flights, and then came Elon Musk and does same thing cheaper and better, making exact same thing profitable rather than subsidized by millions of tax payers. So it's a matter of HOW YOU DO IT and not how much money you throw at it. There weren't any BB10 licence takers? So maybe the conditions were ****ty, compared to Android they could get instead? Maybe it took making them just as good, at least initially, to attract anyone?

Comparisons to Windows phones? Two completely different reasons. Only Windows 10 became really usable, but too late. Windows Phone 7 and 7.5 were a functional DISASTER, Windows Phone 8 a bit better. Even Microsoft's billions weren't able to make people buy such a crappy OS when there were much better alternatives. Not only now, but the very same thing happened with their previous attempt 10 years earlier when their "Microsoft Smartphone" platform just couldn't compete with Symbian and even eating British phone maker Sendo didn't help them. Nothing to do with BB10's outstanding quality, about which NO ONE KNEW A THING.

BB10 had to have been be launched no later than 2009 to have had even the smallest hope - and that's assuming they could have even come close to the massive spending/investments/development by Google and Apple in the OS and related ecosystem.

[BurningPlatform]

BB10 had to be launched no later than 2009 to have had even the smallest hope

Please let me keep my opinion, i.e. that by around mid 2012 it was just enough to make BB10 the destination for a huge part of those Symbian users who just then (and not in 2009) were migrating to a new platform. We're talking about hundreds of millions of people. Did it really take more than that?

[conite]

Please let me keep my opinion, i.e. that by around mid 2012 it was just enough to make BB10 the destination for a huge part of those Symbian users who just then (and not in 2009) were migrating to a new platform. We're talking about hundreds of millions of people. Did it really take more than that?

You're missing the fact that the ecosystem makes the platform. By 2010/11/12 the lead was insurmountable.

Windows Phone was launched in late 2010 and went nowhere.

[BurningPlatform]

You're missing the fact that the ecosystem makes the platform. By 2011/12 the lead was insurmountable.

No, I don't ignore that fact. It's just that being a developer myself (and having ported all my apps from Symbian to BB10 myself) I know well what it took to bring tens of thousands of Symbian apps to BB10.

As I wrote earlier, both platforms were Qt 4.x based (unlike any other). Porting an average Qt app from Symbian or MeeGo to BB10 took HOURS. Not weeks, not days, HOURS. Or actually MINUTES if you chose to initially keep its original Symbian or MeeGo UI rather than rewrite it in Cascades, as in such case it only took adding Symbian Components files to the project and rebuilding it. YES, that's how quick and easy it was. That's how I ported my apps, within minutes, and only then, gradually, rewrote them in Cascades and uploaded as new versions (updates).

Symbian didn't lack developers or apps - there were tens of thousands of them. And starting from early 2012 they really needed to find themselves a new platform. If only BB10 was on the market just when (and not a year after) they HAD TO go somewhere to keep earning money, it would have been a natural destination for them due to the ease and speed of porting apps. I guess it doesn't take explanation that if they had a choice between spending months on learning Android APIs and Java or spending a few days on having all their apps fully ported to BB10 then they wouldn't have hesitated for too long.

The problem was that they WEREN'T GIVEN such a choice. They had to make it (and so they did it) in 2012. BB10 came out in mid 2013 when they all already were (un?)happy Android developers.

Long story short, by mid 2012 tens of thousands of Symbian apps COULD have been EFFORTLESSLY ported to BB10, resulting in quite a decent app ecosystem. But not in 2013 when only a few of us were left.

[anon(5597702)]

No, it wasn't. Technically, it was the best mobile OS on the market. Just incomparably better than (at the time) unstable, messy and ugly Android. A few small things could have changed everything.

First of all, if not that huge delay, if BB10 came out as planned (i.e. about a year earlier) it would have been the platform that hundreds of millions (yes, hundreds of millions) of Symbian users (and a few million of Maemo/MeeGo users) would have switched to.

I do know what I am saying, because I used to run the oldest and one of the biggest Symbian community website where I had some ~150.000 registered forum members (and countless guests) from around the world and up to 2 million unique visits a month, which at that time was really something (in its best times the site ranked in Alexa at about 5000-6000th location in the Internet when it comes to visits). The site was Symbian's official affiliate partner, the (only) winner of Nokia/S60 Consortium's Evangelist award for promoting Symbian to the general public, etc. With such a huge user base, I do know what Symbian users wanted at that time.

Starting from late 2011 all Symbian (40% marketshare) users where desperately looking for an alternative to their quickly dying platform finished off by Elop. I still remember how the first BB10 OS screenshots and news about its gesture-driven UI, multitasking, etc. appeared and made all Symbian users **** their pants that a PROPER REPLACEMENT for Symbian and MeeGo was coming, closely (much more than any other) resembling features of those Nokia OSes. Tens of thousands of Symbian/MeeGo developers (myself included) were extremely happy, too, because BB10 was based on Qt, just like Symbian and MeeGo, so porting apps to it was trivial, a matter of literally hours. My first couple of BB10 apps were ported from Symbian within one day.

People waited and waited for BB10 to come out, and eventually most of them had to go Android (as it was no longer possible to keep using the dead Symbian platform), which turned out to be the only (not really exciting) choice, as dumb iOS and even dumber Windows Phone weren't an option for majority of them.

That's why Android marketshare suddenly grew by some 30% in around 2012. It could (and would!) have been BB10 instead, if it only came out in early-to-mid 2012, and not mid 2013 when it was much too late because majority of Symbian users had already been forced to switch. Same for developers, who waited and waited and most of them went Android or iOS during 2012 as they couldn't live any longer without any revenue. And once they switched and made the huge effort to learn the new APIs and environment, they didn't bother to go back.

That single delay changed EVERYTHING. So maybe instead of blowing billions then on trying to sell it when there wasn't anyone left to buy it, BlackBerry should have invested 10% of it into bringing BB10 to the market in time, when hundreds of millions of people were just looking for a new platform to switch to.

And even then, marketing was next to none. Even if sometimes an average customer could hear something about BB10 then it was not much besides that it's a platform that "can run Android apps". Which was something that just COULDN'T have made anyone interested, because to run Android apps everyone considered a "genuine" Android device a proper option.

So if something was a "mistake of epic proportions" then it was not BB10 itself but the way it was brought to the market. If it happened as planned, it would have been perfectly aligned with one in a million fantastic opportunity that at the very same time one of the biggest smartphone platform in the world was killed and hundreds of millions of its users were just then deserately looking for an alternative and very eager to try BB10 as it was the closest thing to Symbian they could get. Wasting such an unbelievable opportunity was the biggest failure they could have made. And they did it.

This forum is full of statements from its "Trusted Members" and "Ambassadors" like that e.g. "BlackBerry blew billions on BB10" or that "BlackBerry always wanted to license BB10 but they weren't any takers".

What kind of arguments are those? NASA also blew billions on space flights, and then came Elon Musk and does same thing cheaper and better, making exact same thing profitable rather than subsidized by millions of tax payers. So it's a matter of HOW YOU DO IT and not how much money you throw at it. There weren't any BB10 licence takers? So maybe the conditions were ****ty, compared to Android they could get instead? Maybe it took making them just as good, at least initially, to attract anyone?

Comparisons to Windows phones? Two completely different reasons. Only Windows 10 became really usable, but too late. Windows Phone 7 and 7.5 were a functional DISASTER, Windows Phone 8 a bit better. Even Microsoft's billions weren't able to make people buy such a crappy OS when there were much better alternatives. Not only now, but the very same thing happened with their previous attempt 10 years earlier when their "Microsoft Smartphone" platform just couldn't compete with Symbian and even eating British phone maker Sendo didn't help them. Nothing to do with BB10's outstanding quality, about which NO ONE KNEW A THING.

Finally, a cogent well thought out piece from an actual bb10 developer. Refreshing!

Posted via CB10

[Dunt Dunt Dunt]

NO ONE KNEW A THING.

Most people don't want to know anything about the OS... they just want the results that they expect. In 2013 that was Instagram, CandyCrush and dozens of other apps (appreciate your contributions, but there were KEY apps needed that neither you or 100's of Symbian developers could have brought to the table).

If BlackBerry had started in 2008, taken the four years it took them to get out a stable version of BB10 (10.2). They still would have run into the same app gap problems and the same can't compete on hardware issues. I don't see 2012 changing that. BlackBerry was simply too small for the task of competing in what was becoming such a huge market.

Back in 2007, Google went out of their way to court developers... made the platform "open" to appeal to them. And probable spent billions in the promotion of Android and early deals to get devices built and on carrier networks. OEMs were in a panic to find something that would compete against Apple back then. By 2012, I don't see how a closed and secured OS was going to compete, with no userbase was going to attract anyone.

I think BB10 would have been a much better mobile operating system than Android or iOS... there was so much potential...

But I personally think it needed to have been in development back in 2005... even then I'm not sure BlackBerry could have competed in the consumer market, but might have held onto the enterprise market (if they could get the apps enterprise needed).

[conite]

No, I don't ignore that fact. It's just that being a developer myself (and having ported all my apps from Symbian to BB10 myself) I know well what it took to bring tens of thousands of Symbian apps to BB10.

As I wrote earlier, both platforms were Qt 4.x based (unlike any other). Porting an average Qt app from Symbian or MeeGo to BB10 took HOURS. Not weeks, not days, HOURS. Or actually MINUTES if you chose to initially keep its original Symbian or MeeGo UI rather than rewrite it in Cascades, as in such case it only took adding Symbian Components files to the project and rebuilding it. YES, that's how quick and easy it was. That's how I ported my apps, within minutes, and only then, gradually, rewrote them in Cascades and uploaded as new versions (updates).

Symbian didn't lack developers or apps - there were tens of thousands of them. And starting from early 2012 they really needed to find themselves a new platform. If only BB10 was on the market just when (and not a year after) they HAD TO go somewhere to keep earning money, it would have been a natural destination for them due to the ease and speed of porting apps. I guess it doesn't take explanation that if they had a choice between spending months on learning Android APIs and Java or spending a few days on having all their apps fully ported to BB10 then they wouldn't have hesitated for too long.

The problem was that they WEREN'T GIVEN such a choice. They had to make it (and so they did it) in 2012. BB10 came out in mid 2013 when they all already were (un?)happy Android developers.

Long story short, by mid 2012 tens of thousands of Symbian apps COULD have been EFFORTLESSLY ported to BB10, resulting in quite a decent app ecosystem. But not in 2013 when only a few of us were left.

The available Symbian apps (or a subset thereof) were not the ones people were looking for.

By 2010/11, the ecosystem game had already changed completely.

[Chuck Finley69]

No, it wasn't. Technically, it was the best mobile OS on the market. Just incomparably better than (at the time) unstable, messy and ugly Android. A few small things could have changed everything.

First of all, if not that huge delay, if BB10 came out as planned (i.e. about a year earlier) it would have been the platform that hundreds of millions (yes, hundreds of millions) of Symbian users (and a few million of Maemo/MeeGo users) would have switched to.

I do know what I am saying, because I used to run the oldest and one of the biggest Symbian community website where I had some ~150.000 registered forum members (and countless guests) from around the world and up to 2 million unique visits a month, which at that time was really something (in its best times the site ranked in Alexa at about 5000-6000th location in the Internet when it comes to visits). The site was Symbian's official affiliate partner, the (only) winner of Nokia/S60 Consortium's Evangelist award for promoting Symbian to the general public, etc. With such a huge user base, I do know what Symbian users wanted at that time.

Starting from late 2011 all Symbian (40% marketshare) users where desperately looking for an alternative to their quickly dying platform finished off by Elop. I still remember how the first BB10 OS screenshots and news about its gesture-driven UI, multitasking, etc. appeared and made all Symbian users **** their pants that a PROPER REPLACEMENT for Symbian and MeeGo was coming, closely (much more than any other) resembling features of those Nokia OSes. Tens of thousands of Symbian/MeeGo developers (myself included) were extremely happy, too, because BB10 was based on Qt, just like Symbian and MeeGo, so porting apps to it was trivial, a matter of literally hours. My first couple of BB10 apps were ported from Symbian within one day.

People waited and waited for BB10 to come out, and eventually most of them had to go Android (as it was no longer possible to keep using the dead Symbian platform), which turned out to be the only (not really exciting) choice, as dumb iOS and even dumber Windows Phone weren't an option for majority of them.

That's why Android marketshare suddenly grew by some 30% in around 2012. It could (and would!) have been BB10 instead, if it only came out in early-to-mid 2012, and not mid 2013 when it was much too late because majority of Symbian users had already been forced to switch. Same for developers, who waited and waited and most of them went Android or iOS during 2012 as they couldn't live any longer without any revenue. And once they switched and made the huge effort to learn the new APIs and environment, they didn't bother to go back.

That single delay changed EVERYTHING. So maybe instead of blowing billions then on trying to sell it when there wasn't anyone left to buy it, BlackBerry should have invested 10% of it into bringing BB10 to the market in time, when hundreds of millions of people were just looking for a new platform to switch to.

And even then, marketing was next to none. Even if sometimes an average customer could hear something about BB10 then it was not much besides that it's a platform that "can run Android apps". Which was something that just COULDN'T have made anyone interested, because to run Android apps everyone considered a "genuine" Android device a proper option.

So if something was a "mistake of epic proportions" then it was not BB10 itself but the way it was brought to the market. If it happened as planned, it would have been perfectly aligned with one in a million fantastic opportunity that at the very same time one of the biggest smartphone platform in the world was killed and hundreds of millions of its users were just then deserately looking for an alternative and very eager to try BB10 as it was the closest thing to Symbian they could get. Wasting such an unbelievable opportunity was the biggest failure they could have made. And they did it.

This forum is full of statements from its "Trusted Members" and "Ambassadors" like that e.g. "BlackBerry blew billions on BB10" or that "BlackBerry always wanted to license BB10 but they weren't any takers".

What kind of arguments are those? NASA also blew billions on space flights, and then came Elon Musk and does same thing cheaper and better, making exact same thing profitable rather than subsidized by millions of tax payers. So it's a matter of HOW YOU DO IT and not how much money you throw at it. There weren't any BB10 licence takers? So maybe the conditions were ****ty, compared to Android they could get instead? Maybe it took making them just as good, at least initially, to attract anyone?

Comparisons to Windows phones? Two completely different reasons. Only Windows 10 became really usable, but too late. Windows Phone 7 and 7.5 were a functional DISASTER, Windows Phone 8 a bit better. Even Microsoft's billions weren't able to make people buy such a crappy OS when there were much better alternatives. Not only now, but the very same thing happened with their previous attempt 10 years earlier when their "Microsoft Smartphone" platform just couldn't compete with Symbian and even eating British phone maker Sendo didn't help them. Nothing to do with BB10's outstanding quality, about which NO ONE KNEW A THING.

Sure it was the epic mistake. The mistake is that BB didn’t have anything close to economic resources or partnerships that Google had and exploited with OEMs, carriers and first party social media conglomerate developers. You could have given BB in 2005, Android OS, but they didn’t have the economic sources of revenue to replace BBOS and SAF with alternate revenue streams immediately to scale up the carrier and consumer adoption rates.

With Android, Google purely displaced the old guard with consumer data as the revenue engine for everyone to share, consumer and producer alike.

[BurningPlatform]

The available Symbian apps (or a subset thereof) were not the ones people were looking for.

If even just those average Symbian apps were there instantly ported to BB10, making it an ecosystem of readily available - say - 20,000 or 30,000 native apps in 2012, I guess that those huge players' attitude and their willingness to port to BB10 all those Instagrams and such would have also been different vs. their interest in a platform with an almost empty app store that the BB10 was in 2013.

And if in addition to those Symbian apps the platform also had an army of former Symbian users, I can't imagine how Instagram (and such) could have resisted to QUICKLY release their apps for it.

Anyway, my intention isn't to play a wise man here. I just wanted to share what I witnessed, having been an owner of a huge Symbian community site and a Symbian developer myself back in those days. I did witness that huge interest in BB10 among lots of Symbian users and their disappointment when they eventually had to switch to Android as their Symbian phones became too old, slow and unsupported and BB10 still wasn't there. And I did witness the interest among Symbian developers in BB10, which as a Qt platform was the easiest choice for them, not requiring to learn everything from scratch and fully rewrite their apps rather than rapidly port them. But they had to make money for living, so after months of waiting they all went Android and iOS and when the BB10 finally came out in mid 2013 there was literally no one left.

Unquestionably, it would have given BB10 a completely different start. I'm not saying a guarantee for success, but surely a wholly different starting point.

Most people don't want to know anything about the OS

Maybe except for that it at all *exists*. Whereas if I showed (even in 2015) a BB10 phone to 10 people, 9 to 10 of them have never heard before that such a platform existed. More people were aware of existence of such a niche things as some audiophile audio brand than a BB10 smartphone, and that in a world where everyone talks about smartphones, not audiophile equipment. If it's not a bad (if any at all) marketing not to make people aware even of just existence of some brand, then I don't know what it is.

taken the four years it took them to get out a stable version of BB10 (10.2).

So, as I said, instead of wasting billions on trying to sell BB10 *past* the time that there was no one left to buy it, they should have EARLIER invested 10% of it into a bigger development team whom it would have taken much less time to make it.

Again, after Elop announced ditching Symbian in very early 2011, not only were there users but also dozens of professional OS developers (Qt, Symbian, MeeGo) formerly working for Nokia and now looking for a new home for themselves. Those were the most qualified people in the world to rapidly boost BB10 (a Qt based OS) development. If they got a good proposal, I'm sure that many of them wouldn't have hesitated for too long to work for as reputable brand as BlackBerry. Did BlackBerry make any efforts in 2011 to quickly hire those then jobless experienced Nokia Qt developers to help bring BB10 to the market as quickly as possible? I seriously doubt it considering that so many of them went such a risky (and for so long completely unprofitable) business as Jolla instead.

I don't see 2012 changing that.

If Symbian users went BB10 (and that they were extremely interested in it was a fact, not a speculation), a marketshare they would have given it of - say - 20% would have changed a lot in terms of other companies' attitude towards BB10 vs. a marketshare of a few percent. While it doesn't surprise too much that porting Instagram etc. to a platform with 10 million users didn't make sense to such sharks, doing it for - say - 100 million users would have surely been more tempting, quite possibly to the point that they would've done it.

Remember: by the time Symbian users went Android, Symbian and Android marketshares were comparable. It was Symbian users who nearly DOUBLED Android marketshare. In other words, every Symbian user who would have gone BB10 rather than Android not only would have made BB10 bigger but at the same time he'd have made Android smaller. A BB10 marketshare of 20% would have meant at the same time a 20% lower marketshare of Android. So yes, it would have changed a lot.

BlackBerry was simply too small

Are you saying that they were not too small to waste billions on trying to sell BB10 in 2013-2015, but too small to spend - say - 100 or 200 million to hire the best in the world Qt developers fired from Nokia by Elop in February 2011, who would have accelerated BB10 development 10-fold or so?

BlackBerry ignored them so they made Jolla, and within a few months they created the whole Sailfish OS *FROM SCRATCH*. Imagine how their potential could have changed BB10 development - if only someone at BlackBerry wanted to pay them at that time.

And before you ask: in BB10 the QNX "core" didn't really need much development. What took them so long was the Qt "middleware" layer (with all the APIs) and above (i.e. the UI etc). Exactly what those Qt system developers fired from Nokia would have EXCELLED at. With Android runtime implementation they wouldn't have had much problems, either, considering by how nicely they did it in Sailfish.

I don't see how a closed and secured OS was going to compete, with no userbase was going to attract anyone.

Again, I insist that the user base of Symbian (at that time almost equal to Android), looking for a new platform for themselves starting from early 2012, would have been just enough to completely change things.

If that type of OS wasn't an option for those people, why were they (let me repeat it: hundreds of millions of people) Symbian users still in 2011, four years after Android came out?

Why in Q4 2010 the Nokia N8 and then in Q1 2011 the E7 (the first devices with Symbian ^3) were the best selling Symbian devices *ever* (millions of units per quarter)? Why the MeeGo based Nokia N9, which was released AFTER Elop publicly announced that MeeGo development would NOT be continued and it was never promoted or supported (nor offered or subsidized by any operator), sold in more than 2 million units within just a few months? Oh, wait! Even in mid 2012, a year after announcing Symbian's death, Nokia released and within some 3-4 months sold hundreds of thousands of units of the 808 PureView model (the last Symbian phone).

How come that tens of millions of people were buying such expensive (and quite low end, as the 808 PureView with its single-core 1.3 GHz CPU was incomparably worse than e.g. the dual-core Krait based Nexus 4 released at around the same time) devices with an already discontinued OS? Clearly because AN AWFUL LOT OF THEM STRONGLY PREFERRED such an OS and categorically DISLIKED all the existing alternatives, apparently regardless of app availability. That's why so many of them were strongly interested in BB10.

You have no idea how unhappy all those people were when they finally had no choice but to switch to the insecure, unstable and messy Android, which was truly DISASTROUS in that respect back then in 2012 for every Symbian user strongly used to stability and security. It actually didn't differ much from how now the most die-hard BB10 fans can't imagine that soon they'll have to lose BB10's security and stability and switch to Android, only the SCALE was totally different because at that time it was millions of Symbian users.

[wbalogh]

No, I don't ignore that fact. It's just that being a developer myself (and having ported all my apps from Symbian to BB10 myself) I know well what it took to bring tens of thousands of Symbian apps to BB10.

As I wrote earlier, both platforms were Qt 4.x based (unlike any other). Porting an average Qt app from Symbian or MeeGo to BB10 took HOURS. Not weeks, not days, HOURS. Or actually MINUTES if you chose to initially keep its original Symbian or MeeGo UI rather than rewrite it in Cascades, as in such case it only took adding Symbian Components files to the project and rebuilding it. YES, that's how quick and easy it was. That's how I ported my apps, within minutes, and only then, gradually, rewrote them in Cascades and uploaded as new versions (updates).

Symbian didn't lack developers or apps - there were tens of thousands of them. And starting from early 2012 they really needed to find themselves a new platform. If only BB10 was on the market just when (and not a year after) they HAD TO go somewhere to keep earning money, it would have been a natural destination for them due to the ease and speed of porting apps. I guess it doesn't take explanation that if they had a choice between spending months on learning Android APIs and Java or spending a few days on having all their apps fully ported to BB10 then they wouldn't have hesitated for too long.

The problem was that they WEREN'T GIVEN such a choice. They had to make it (and so they did it) in 2012. BB10 came out in mid 2013 when they all already were (un?)happy Android developers.

Long story short, by mid 2012 tens of thousands of Symbian apps COULD have been EFFORTLESSLY ported to BB10, resulting in quite a decent app ecosystem. But not in 2013 when only a few of us were left.

What apps did you port?
Is it possible to PM you from cb10?

Cheers!

Posted via CB10

[BurningPlatform]

What apps did you port?

I've had some 20-25 apps for BB10. The ones ported directly from Symbian were those:

https://forums.crackberry.com/app-an...nt-944906-new/

https://forums.crackberry.com/app-an...w-bb10-945119/

https://forums.crackberry.com/app-an...n-tool-946184/

https://forums.crackberry.com/app-an...g-tool-946189/

https://forums.crackberry.com/app-an...o-bb10-948628/

You can even see on the screenshots how the initial versions had a Symbian-ish UI then replaced with native Cascades UI.

The remaining apps of mine were not ported from Symbian but written from scratch natively for BB10.

http://burning-platform.blogspot.com/

[Rootbrian]

Still rocking mine. Backup is classic. Soon, not unknown, is key2. I'll be full-on android. However, i'm satisfied still.

Submitted via blackberry passport on freedom mobile HSPA+ or LTE

[YesAndNo]

I gotta admit, I'm the biggest BlackBerry fan I know. I take "abuse" from people weekly for it. But even I left for a spell a few months ago to try the Samsung Note 9 as I was tired of making concessions for my Passport or carrying around two devices to make up for the app gap,...

But I'm back. Yes, back to the BlackBerry Passport as my primary daily driver. Why? Simple, I want to. For me, the pros still outweigh the cons. After having a top of the line Android smartphone as my primary device, I kept longing for a better typing and messaging experience, and luckily I knew where to find it because I loved my Passport for 3 years prior to leaving, and of course never got rid of it just in case I needed to come back.

But how does one use a BlackBerry Passport as a primary daily driver in 2019 in this world driven by apps and media consumption? Simple, you do without or you supplement for what you're lacking. So I am doing a little both. Sometimes when I need apps and insurance of working websites and a great camera, I carry both devices. Sometimes when I only need the basics, I carry only my beloved Passport. Annoying? Perhaps to some, but I found it more annoying without my Passport. Annoying is relative.

"BUT, there's no future with the Passport!!!" Maybe, but there's still a present, and that's where I live. Yes, to each its own...

If you still use the Passport primarily, I'm curious how and why?

Cheers

P.S. I'm still holding out hope that somehow, someday a new Passport surfaces that allows us to be "future-proof". I know, fat chance...

Posted via CB10

Mine it is still going strong!