Demise Of BlackBerry 10: Blackberry To Focus On Android Now

A shrewd move. Just hope it doesn’t go down in history as BlackBerry’s swansong.

BlackBerry has been a company that’s stuck to its own operating system (as has Microsoft).

But in the last couple of years that hasn’t been working so well for them.
With Android taking over the mass smartphone market, and Apple’s iOS overtaking the high-end market, BlackBerry seems to have lost on both the ends.

The edge that it had with security and privacy features that it was running on earlier have been brought by other operating systems and aren’t exclusive anymore. With the recent death of BlackBerry OS10, the company might just be abandoning its model until now, as well as its operating system.

In an interview with The National BlackBerry CEO, John Chen stated that the company is officially done with the BlackBerry OS 10 operating system. While it will continue supporting the OS along with continued updates, but it no longer plans to make its signature operating system a part of its newer projects.

What can then be presumed is that the company will be switching to Android as an operating system. And that became clear with the launch of the BlackBerry Priv.

The BlackBerry Priv launched at the Mobile World Congress in February, and after some sales to BlackBerry loyalists and fans, sales dried up.
Global numbers have been negligible, and making their Android entry a high-end device might have been a bad idea.

Even John Chen accepted that it was a strategic misstep for the company to launch a high-end device aiming to reclaim the high-end market from Samsung and Apple.

What was the catch with the phone?

Well, Priv was an Android device, and it was BlackBerry’s first Android device.
“The fact that we came out with a high-end phone [as our first Android device] was probably not as wise as it should have been”.

Despite the debacle, Chen has confirmed that BlackBerry is planning to bring out two more mid-range Android devices in the near future. One of these models will reportedly be a full touchscreen smartphone and the other would have the trademark-BlackBerry QWERTY keypad.

Not much else is known about these devices yet.

To be honest, switching to Android is the last straw that BlackBerry is hanging onto right now.

Given BlackBerry’s market position right now, it is not the go-to device for the low-end smartphone market, the mid-range market, or the high-range market. And it did not disappear suddenly. It has not been on the scene for a while now.

One of the probable reasons could be the popularity of the Android operating system in the low and mid-range market and that of iOS in the high-end market. With that BlackBerry’s operating system practically has nothing left to it anymore, no reason why people would want to stick to it?

If it weren’t for this switch, there wouldn’t be much to write about the company except for the recent failures, one piled on top of another.

However what BlackBerry has to thank for still being in the market is the very loyal user base that it has. There are people who have used the devices from the company for years and passionately support it. And it is for those people that the company has for now been staying afloat.

What would now be interesting to see is how this floating boat keeps afloat. Even after switching to Android, the journey is not going to be easy for BlackBerry. The Android market has already been taken over by companies like Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi, Gionee, Motorola, Micromax, Lenovo, Asus and a few others. With a market that already has so much competition itself, it’ll be like entering a war zone for BlackBerry.

Originally published at Chip-Monks.