[goku_vegeta]

At the risk of bringing out this so-beaten-to-death-it's-now-a-zombie horse, there is a difference between quality of product and marketing.

The market didn't support Blackberry 10 because of two issues: lack of common apps and marketing of the platform. Both those issues could be remedied.

However, I certainly agree on one point: there are definitely not enough fans to support what Blackberry Mobile is currently doing.

When BlackBerry 10 was being launched, I was working at the largest telecom in Canada. The training modules they had for BlackBerry 10 used a lot of the BlackBerry branding, not surprisingly since it was probably made by BlackBerry and adapted by the carriers. I remember doing the training and myself carrying a Z10 at the time. So on that part, they actually did a fairly decent job marketing to the carriers and their reps.

The BlackBerry Z10, Q10, Q5 and Z30 also had live demo units for the customers to play with. I do agree that the app situation was ultimately one of the biggest driving factors of the problem. Part of is was also BlackBerry users themselves. We had multiple customers go from BlackBerry 7, upgrade to a BlackBerry 10 device only to come back about a week later to return it and go back to BlackBerry 7. I remember back during the BlackBerry OS 5.0 days some of the disdain our users had on the BlackBerry 6 update as well.

[Bbnivende]

The glory days for me was when we had Snap.

I should have known what the end result would be based on my Playbook experience.

Back in 2013, people just wanted to turn on a phone and see a screen with array of icons. They Just wanted the no muss no fuss experience offered by an iPhone or the bigger screen offered by Samsung.

I did not own a PC so therefore I could not get the Cobalt solution to work for me.

I expressed the view in 2013 that I was OK with including Android apps into BlackBerry World but few agreed. Why should BlackBerry users have to use Amazon? Or Cobalt.

I really wanted BlackBerry to succeed but it was not to be.

[conite]

The glory days for me was when we had Snap.

I should have known what the end result would be based on my Playbook experience.

Back in 2013, people just wanted to turn on a phone and see a screen with array of icons. They Just wanted the no muss no fuss experience offered by an iPhone or the bigger screen offered by Samsung.

I did not own a PC so therefore I could not get the Cobalt solution to work for me.

I expressed the view in 2013 that I was OK with including Android apps into BlackBerry World but few agreed. Why should BlackBerry users have to use Amazon? Or Cobalt.

I really wanted BlackBerry to succeed but it was not to be.

Half of the apps, at least, on BlackBerry World were Android ports. By adding the Amazon app store to BB10 devices, the ecosystem quadrupled in size overnight.

But of course, it was too little too late, and many of the apps on the Amazon app store were just old versions sent out to pasture.

But, you're absolutely right that people just wanted the same apps that everyone else had. I mean, that was really the point of BB10 in the first place. For just solid communication, you can't beat BBOS.

[goku_vegeta]

The glory days for me was when we had Snap.

I should have known what the end result would be based on my Playbook experience.

Back in 2013, people just wanted to turn on a phone and see a screen with array of icons. They Just wanted the no muss no fuss experience offered by an iPhone or the bigger screen offered by Samsung.

I did not own a PC so therefore I could not get the Cobalt solution to work for me.

I expressed the view in 2013 that I was OK with including Android apps into BlackBerry World but few agreed. Why should BlackBerry users have to use Amazon? Or Cobalt.

I really wanted BlackBerry to succeed but it was not to be.

This is really the issue with pretty much any new platform which wants to compete with Android and iOS. We've got to wait and see to see if HarmonyOS will have better luck but pretty much every other platform has been a commercial failure and we've always dropped back to the duopoly that is Android and iOS.

[Bbnivende]

Half of the apps, at least, on BlackBerry World were Android ports. By adding the Amazon app store to BB10 devices, the ecosystem quadrupled in size overnight.

But of course, it was too little too late, and many of the apps on the Amazon app store were just old versions sent out to pasture.

There seemed to be a lot of issues in getting the Amazon apps to run properly which resulted in poor reviews and developers limiting app access.

Was it necessary to port an app ?could BBW just not have an Android store?

[conite]

There seemed to be a lot of issues in getting the Amazon apps to run properly which resulted in poor reviews and developers limiting app access.

Was it necessary to port an app ?could BBW just not have an Android store?

Many developers refused to go through that extra step. They simply didn't want to support another platform.

As a matter of fact, once developers caught on to what was happening with the Amazon Appstore, they started blacklisting BB10 devices for the same reason.

[goku_vegeta]

Correct me if I'm wrong here but the Android app issue was two fold.

1. Google Play was not directly available because the platform, BlackBerry 10 was technically not "android" it just contained an Android runtime.

2. Leading from 1, BlackBerry (at the time) was not a member of the Open Handset Alliance (OHA) so they really couldn't "make" an Android device which contained all of the Google apps (which are not open source), nor would it ever be a "certified" android device.

3. The runtime supported a select number of APIs and features. Sometimes some of these features connected to native elements of the BlackBerry 10 OS and vice versa. For instance the Japanese dictionary app Aedict. You could be typing an email and you want to translate a word into Japanese, you could copy the word, open the share sheet and go to Aedict (android app), and it would translate it into Japanese. You could also be in the app, copy a word, "share" and have it pasted into a native BlackBerry 10 app like Remember. Sometimes these features work seamlessly, other times some elements, like the Google Dictation within apps, is not supported and is broken.

Android devs would have had to find out how their app works, what APIs are still supported, rewrite if necessary or remove some features entirely if they rely on Google Play Services, add the app to BlackBerry World and expect users to download them.

Hence why it was somewhat easier for users to just download the APKs and see for themselves what would work and what was broken. Definitely not the ideal situation for BlackBerry 10, but I will admit when we got the updated Android runtime, it kept me on the BlackBerry 10 platform a little bit longer than I would otherwise have stayed around.

[Dunt Dunt Dunt]

I should have known what the end result would be based on my Playbook experience.

As should BlackBerry....

[Elephant_Canyon]

On the contrary, we have an additional reality: BB10 is and was the best mobile OS for privacy and security ever made but faced marketing and native app gap problems which caused trouble for it in the market.

You are welcome to whatever imaginative scenarios you wish to believe.

[Chuck Finley69]

Most people don't care about the OS... they care about what a phone can do.

Yes BB10 had a lot of potential and I think would have been a better solution than Android or iOS.... but we are talking about five/six years ago. 2014 was BB10's prime - had the APK capability added, Android Runtime was still fully supported, Cobalt's Store gave us a good portion of Play Apps (but never all), stable 10.2 was released and we had regular updates most of the year.

For consumer acceptance, BB10 would have needed to maintain the functionality and ecosystem that we call BBAndroid today. When OEMs, for the overwhelming majority, aren’t profitably successful on a consistent basis with Android of any flavor, there’s no possible way that BB10 and it’s successors would have even been a sustainable third OS anymore that BBAndroid has been.

[i_plod_an_dr_void]

I keep hearing that half the apps on BlackBerry World were android ports anyways as if it was a bad thing. It wasn't. It was a great thing. The point was BlackBerry was trying to make it easier to port your (Appmakers) apps to bb10...meaning you didn't need wildly different code bases to support . Weird how this has been morphed into something bad sounding.

[i_plod_an_dr_void]

....but we get back to that Google/Android cartel argument in no short order as to how some of the most popular app makers wouldn't support BB10.

By the way I love that soothing Hey Blackberry....British accented woman voice assistant. Who can we howl at for dropping support for it on BB10? I want that more than the native twitter app. Also when will BlackBerry announce a delay to the shutdown of BlackBerryWorld? They'll need it to sell us a BB10 OS upgrade (for a fee) revenue model.

[conite]

I keep hearing that half the apps on BlackBerry World were android ports anyways as if it was a bad thing. It wasn't. It was a great thing. The point was BlackBerry was trying to make it easier to port your (Appmakers) apps to bb10...meaning you didn't need wildly different code bases to support . Weird how this has been morphed into something bad sounding.

I don't think it's a bad thing at all. But it does signal how much interest developers actually had in the platform.

Some allowed their existing Android apps to be ported (and then usually abandoned them), but most didn't.

[i_plod_an_dr_void]

Did they shut down some of the Blackberry voice assistant, because in crowds of Hey Google users recently, I would join in and on my BB10 PHONE say Hey BlackBerry.... ...and everyone would hear that attactive sounding British girl answer me (using UK english, female voice). Huh? BlackBerry has an assistant? they would all say.

[i_plod_an_dr_void]

...I could only imagine that today the options (if BB10 took off) would be expanded so that I could switch at will to a stern no nonsense scottish woman, or a sweet Irish lass, or even a laid-back but friendly native (oop first nations) girl by now.

[Dunt Dunt Dunt]

...I could only imagine that today the options (if BB10 took off) would be expanded so that I could switch at will to a stern no nonsense scottish woman, or a sweet Irish lass, or even a laid-back but friendly native (oop first nations) girl by now.

Never was really a BlackBerry Assistant.... BlackBerry just tapped into Maluuba which was acquired by Microsoft back in 2017. Surprised you haven't heard Cortana talking to you...

[bb10adopter111]

For consumer acceptance, BB10 would have needed to maintain the functionality and ecosystem that we call BBAndroid today. When OEMs, for the overwhelming majority, aren’t profitably successful on a consistent basis with Android of any flavor, there’s no possible way that BB10 and it’s successors would have even been a sustainable third OS anymore that BBAndroid has been.

And, of course, BlackBerry was not even talking to consumers in any part of the design process. Their DNA was always in the Enterprise IT and security stack. So, their approach when launching BB10 was to replicate all of BBOS with "just enough" smart phone features to match up with Apple (camera, maps, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Salesforce, etc.). The ART was a bone for consumers who wanted additional apps.

If their plan had worked, enough Enterprises would have bought into BB10 to attract developers and other partners. But, it was already too late. Apple had had enough time to address Enterprise security concerns, and Android had had enough time to build market share. In the end, the real technical benefits of BB10 for enterprises were too marginal to displace Apple and Google.

Posted with my trusty Z10

[i_plod_an_dr_void]

Never was really a BlackBerry Assistant.... BlackBerry just tapped into Maluuba which was acquired by Microsoft back in 2017. Surprised you haven't heard Cortana talking to you...

Actually never really trusted that Cortana wasn't always listening in (by design or by hack), on the desktop so immediately disabled it, given all the vulnerabilities in windows. Can't remember what she sounded like. I was a little more trusting of BlackBerry assistant because of the QNX base of BB10, but not at first.

[i_plod_an_dr_void]

Never was really a BlackBerry Assistant.... BlackBerry just tapped into Maluuba which was acquired by Microsoft back in 2017. Surprised you haven't heard Cortana talking to you...

Yeah I lookied it up...Maluuba ....it was out of the same technology triangle (Waterloo) that BlackBerry came out of. moved to Montreal (McGill, U/Montreal)....bought by Micosoft in 2017. So I wonder if MS killed it, or just killed it for BB10. I Wonder what terms if any would have been required to keep it, post 2019.

[bb10adopter111]

Actually never really trusted that Cortana wasn't always listening in (by design or by hack), on the desktop so immediately disabled it, given all the vulnerabilities in windows. Can't remember what she sounded like. I was a little more trusting of BlackBerry assistant because of the QNX base of BB10, but not at first.

Good judgment, IMO. I live tech, but networked voice assistants that send audio to the mother ship are inherently risky, for many, many reasons. No thank you. It sucks because I love the technology and would use a 100% local voice assistant who only sent transcripts to the mother ship, but we know that that's not the model for Siri, Alexa, et al.

Posted with my trusty Z10

[Emaderton3]

I don't think it's a bad thing at all. But it does signal how much interest developers actually had in the platform.

Some allowed their existing Android apps to be ported (and then usually abandoned them), but most didn't.

But from what I remember, that wasn't the original intent. The runtime was included to entice developers to see what their Android apps would look like on a BB10 device.

[conite]

But from what I remember, that wasn't the original intent. The runtime was included to entice developers to see what their Android apps would look like on a BB10 device.

The hope was to convince them that their apps would be well received on a third platform - enough that they would consider building a native version.

[joeldf]

But from what I remember, that wasn't the original intent. The runtime was included to entice developers to see what their Android apps would look like on a BB10 device.

That was the original intent - give developers time to have their app on the BB10 platform, while they decide if they want to go full native cascades.

Remember that the runtime was initially locked, so you could not do direct apk installs at first. You had to find apks already compiled in a bar wrapper, and sideload the bar file if it wasn't already in BBW.

The runtime was unlocked once BB realized they weren't getting the apps They were hoping for, and that's when the deal with Amazon happened - the only other large app distributor that didn't need Google.

Then, some developers, like Netflix began actively blocking BB10 phones on the Amazon App Store, and Google started really pushing Play Services. That's when Cobalt stepped in to help.

[Bbnivende]

The hope was to convince them that their apps would be well received on a third platform - enough that they would consider building a native version.

This article written in March 2011 predicts the failure of the above strategy.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/mobile/...ran/index.html

[Chuck Finley69]

That was the original intent - give developers time to have their app on the BB10 platform, while they decide if they want to go full native cascades.

Remember that the runtime was initially locked, so you could not do direct apk installs at first. You had to find apks already compiled in a bar wrapper, and sideload the bar file if it wasn't already in BBW.

The runtime was unlocked once BB realized they weren't getting the apps They were hoping for, and that's when the deal with Amazon happened - the only other large app distributor that didn't need Google.

Then, some developers, like Netflix began actively blocking BB10 phones on the Amazon App Store, and Google started really pushing Play Services. That's when Cobalt stepped in to help.

This is exactly how I remember things when researching as consumer user back then.