BlackBerry OS

» see blackberry.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

BlackBerry OS was the kind of thing business people had. in Turkey it meant a manager with a company email account, a device that talked to a corporate server somewhere so the person carrying it could answer work from a taxi. i was not in that demographic. i was an engineering student and then an engineer, and the phones around me went from Nokia to Android without a BlackBerry in the middle.

The software started at Research In Motion in Waterloo, Ontario, first on two-way pagers at the end of the 1990s, then on the little slab phones with the full QWERTY keyboard that became the whole point. It was built in Java, tied to BlackBerry Enterprise Server for push email, and for a few years it was the only way to do serious mail on the move. BBM, the PIN-to-PIN messenger, was the part people actually loved, a private network inside the phone before WhatsApp existed.

At its height around 2011 it carried roughly 80 million subscribers and sat in the pocket of everyone who thought of themselves as busy, up to and including the president of the United States. Then the iPhone arrived, and after it Android, and the whole idea of a phone changed under BlackBerry's feet.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

What made BlackBerry OS win was also what made it lose. It was disciplined about mail and battery in a way nothing else was, and it assumed the keyboard would always be there. When the screen became the keyboard, that assumption turned into dead weight. The browser was bad, the apps were few, and developers went where the users and the money were.

~ how it actually ended ~

RIM bought QNX and built BlackBerry 10 on top of it, a real modern operating system with gestures and a proper browser. It launched on 30 January 2013 to good reviews and empty stores. By 2016 the company had stopped making its own phones and become a security software vendor that happened to own a famous name.

The operating system itself lingered as long as the servers stayed on. On 4 January 2022 BlackBerry switched off the legacy infrastructure for BlackBerry 7.1 and earlier, for BlackBerry 10, and for the PlayBook. After that a classic BlackBerry could not reliably place a call, send a text, or reach data, even over wifi. The devices did not break. The thing they depended on was simply turned off.

~ what came after ~

The physical keyboard people still miss came from here, and so did the idea that a phone should be good at exactly one job before it tries to be good at everything. BBM outlived the OS for a while and then died too. What remains is the muscle memory of thumbs on plastic keys, which no touchscreen has ever fully replaced.

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