Inside BlackBerry's last-ditch plan to win you back with Android
Roger Cheng / CNET :
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece lands mid-arc for a company running out of runway: after Reuters reported in June that BlackBerry was weighing Android for its next phone, it confirmed in September that the Priv would ship at the end of 2015, alongside a second consecutive quarterly loss. Roger Cheng's deep-dive explains why the leap off BlackBerry 10 is the whole strategy rather than an experiment.
It matters because BlackBerry had already signaled the direction earlier that year, floating plans to license its keyboard and Hub software to other device makers as it shifted toward cross-platform services. The Priv tests whether the brand can survive as a differentiated skin on someone else's OS.
First-order effects
- BlackBerry's consumer recovery now rides entirely on one Android device, abandoning the proprietary BlackBerry 10 platform it had staked its identity on.
- Google gains a high-profile hardware partner lending enterprise-security credibility to Android at the premium end of the market.
Second-order effects
- If Priv volumes stay thin — as the following quarter suggested when BlackBerry reported only 600K phones sold and a $238M loss — the economics force a full retreat from manufacturing into the software and device-management business it was already building.
- The positive WSJ verdict that the Priv was the first recommendable BlackBerry in years raises the bar for rivals' keyboard-and-security niche plays, since the differentiators are now available on Android.
Third-order effects
- Small-scale handset makers converge on Android as the only viable OS, competing on hardware design and software layers rather than platforms — a structure that leaves no room for a fourth ecosystem.
- BlackBerry's own arc points toward the end state: a security-software vendor whose hardware era ends once the brand test on borrowed OS infrastructure fails to move volume.
The trend: The article is a data point in the consolidation of smartphone operating systems around Android, where struggling hardware brands survive only by differentiating on top of Google's platform or exiting devices altogether.