What is the reason for the strength of Blackberry on the Indonesian market?
What is the reason for the strength of Blackberry on the Indonesian market?
What strength?
Emtek gave up on BBM.
PT BB Merah Putih has gone out of business.
In the past, like many emerging markets BlackBerry's BIS features along with BBM allowed for bypassing carrier's expensive texting fees. But like western markets, Indonesian networks have improved and other messaging services have become more viable. And hardware is more affordable...
BB started in Indonesia selling mostly Pearls and Curves (often last-year's models) and because of the large market for used phones (carriers would take trade-ins in developed markets and sell those used phones in developing markets), and because data networks were still 2G 5 years after western companies had moved to 3G and then to LTE, and data plans were very expensive. BIS allowed low-cost, fixed-rate data plans, and BBM was included. This lead to BBM being the de facto standard for "texting" (SMS was still "charge per text" in Indonesia), and so BBM, and thus BB phones, were incredibly common and popular, even more than they were 5 years earlier in western countries.
But the same network upgrades happened in Indonesia as happened everywhere else, which obsoleted BIS, and at the same time, low-cost Android phones that had access to the entire Android app ecosystem started to become available, which eroded BB's customer base in Indonesia. BBM was still popular, but started getting replaced by WhatsApp and other apps as people moved to Android, which finally led to BB releasing cross-platform BBM, but it was too late - the migration away from BBM was well underway when cross-platform BBM was released, and after 3 years Emtek has thrown in the towel on it. And BB phones have almost completely been replaced by Android - remember that BB10 never had much adoption, it was all BBOS, and there have been no BBOS phones produced in a long time. Network upgrades have made them unnecessary and eventually will make them unusable, just as in the west, with the move towards 100% LTE and the discontinuation of older (GSM and CDMA) standards.
Wouldn't venture to guess about the overall market but two clients of mine in that nation of islands spend a great deal of time traveling island to island. Air, ferry, etc. They express, to this day, admiration for BBOS's ability to maintain business communications while traveling, waiting in lines, walking, with briefcase in hand... Etc As ONE, small, example. Exposure to them has certainly informed my use case preferences. No clue how that might extrapolate to the populace at large? If at all? Possibly a cultural "work ethic" thing??? A market sample of two, fwiw.
There are always going to be those hardcore business users - there are still hard-core communications guys using BBOS in the US today - not many, but still! - but as you mentioned, this really isn't reflective of the general population of smartphone users.
All over the world, the use cases for smartphones for the general population/average consumer have greatly changed from 10 years ago, because smartphones of today can do so much more than smartphones from 10 years ago, which were really ONLY good for communication. And most people will accept a 10-20% loss of typed communication inefficiency to gain voice control, voice dictation, video chat, picture-based communications (SnapChat/Instagram and to a lesser degree FB and Twitter), and all of the other apps and functions. There's no putting the lid back on that Pandora's box...
Agreed. There are still situations where voice of any type proves inappropriate. That 10-20% typing handicap becomes more like 45-50% if BBOS is truly mastered. A commitment few "western" users seem willing to invest, these days.
Exposure to these two clients is typically pretty refreshing after dealing with some "conditionally committed" clients here in US. Lol.
How many needed or wanted to become a 10th-degree black belt in BlackBerry PKB? ;)
I loved blind typing on my Bold... but in the end flick typing and predictive texting easily won me over. Because I'd probable never get past being a 2nd-degree black belt in the art of BlackBerry PKB.
Don't sell yourself short, it's really not that difficult... With practice. No need, if no need, tho. Most obviously have no need. That doesn't alter the reality that SOME of us do. Still.
My industry is competitive. My company is glad our competitors have agreed with you for these past 8 years. Lol. Our secret competitive edge faces eol soon enough.
Mobile technology is here to stay. Certainly worth mastering your chosen platform. Mobile technology is still in infancy, tho. Global conquest still in progress. Be prepared with a plan b (or A' lol) if your chosen & mastered platform evaporates. Btdt. Lol.
Assuming ALL other cultures will automatically adopt dominant "western" priorities might possibly be perceived as arrogant? ??
This post sums up the entire state of the Indonesian market on BlackBerry quite well. To add some additional context, the Curve 8520 was one of the, if not the, most popular BlackBerry device in Indonesia. In less than 2 months, it will mark a decade since this device first launched. Other BBOS device were popular in Indonesia such as the 9300 and 9900, however most of the BlackBerry OS devices sold in Indonesia were from the Curve lineup. In the mid 2010s, you could get an 8520 for a very low price, while it was quite outdated by then, it was still a great device for communication. Phone calls, BBM, text messaging and email all worked fine on that device, even without 3G mobile networking.
As Troy mentioned, BlackBerry 10 was never all that popular in Indonesia. Price was one major factor, alongside the fact that the Indonesian market is currently saturated with very good, low cost Android devices from Xiaomi and Huwaei. The iPhone has also been gaining popularity and definitely seen as a status of wealth, the damn thing is one third of the per capita GDP of the country, this added with the model seen in European countries and India of paying upfront for the phone has restricted adoption of both higher end Android devices and the iPhone.
My wife is Indonesian, and when I went there in 2014 and 2015, there was still a fairly large following of BlackBerry OS devices, however it was definitely less than back in 2010 for instance. We'll be heading back there fairly soon and even we would be surprised to see BBOS devices still kicking around these days. This market has definitely moved on from BlackBerry OS and the QNX BlackBerry 10 and PlayBook OS devices never really stood a chance.
Why pay the equivalent of 600 USD for a Z10 (at launch) when a Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 can be had at 1/3 of the price?