The BlackBerry community and security focus

Its my understanding from reading many of the posts on these forums that the BlackBerry user community really holds security close to their hearts. Often, its quoted as the critical difference between BB10 and other smartphone OS's.

So how is it that leaked OS's and Android APKs from unreliable sources seem to be such a central part of this community? Putting anything on your BlackBerry except from the most pristine of sources is just such a security risk, that I'm having difficulty reconciling the security focus of the community with this behaviour.

I don't want to start a flame war or be critical or anything. As a developer, I am genuinely interested as to why this is happening?

Originally Posted by jack918

Its my understanding from reading many of the posts on these forums that the BlackBerry user community really holds security close to their hearts. Often, its quoted as the critical difference between BB10 and other smartphone OS's.

So how is it that leaked OS's and Android APKs from unreliable sources seem to be such a central part of this community? Putting anything on your BlackBerry except from the most pristine of sources is just such a security risk, that I'm having difficulty reconciling the security focus of the community with this behaviour.

I don't want to start a flame war or be critical or anything. As a developer, I am genuinely interested as to why this is happening?

You do realize that CrackBerry represents a minuscule fraction of actual BlackBerry users and only a portion of those who frequent this site actually loads the leaks, right?

People doing so should know the risks and are proceeding anyway. Just like anything else in life. There is a nice disclaimer everytime you install an APK. Like mentioned we arent the typical user and most wont do any sideloading of bars and APKs. They will be content with the security of BB world

I think it would help you to understand the issue you raised by understanding a couple of things, aside from the points made before this one.

1) Take all the people who talk about security (:hold it close to their heart) and then ask them to explain what they are talking about. The vast majority will have nothing more than buzzwords and lines that are repeated so often they have an air of intelligence but make no mistake, most of those people have no clue what they are talking about. And I will readily admit that I am no expert on mobile security.

2) When people point out the security of BlackBerry over the other platforms, again, they have no clue as to how it is better or why it is different. For a great deal, security is almost a marketing term that they can pull out whenever all their other arguments as to why their chosen platform is better fail. Sort of like "but President Obama use one so that is how secure it is"

3) It is my understanding (again, dodgy at best) that the structure of the OS makes it almost impossible for an app loaded from an APK, regardless of source, to do any damage or untoward things from a security standpoint. I have personally, fro OS 4 forward, never had an issue with a leaked OS with respect to security.