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With BB10, RIM Tries To Break Out of the 'Mobile Ecosystem' Model
Alt-kun writes "This past week has seen a couple of interesting articles about Research In Motion's strategic plans for BlackBerry 10. The Globe and Mail thinks that by pushing HTML5 for app development, they want to make mobile applications platform-neutral, which would let them sell devices purely on the strength of the hardware and OS, rather than on the ecosystem. And the Guelph Mercury notes that they also plan to push BB10 as the basis for a whole range of mobile and embedded devices, not just phones and tablets. One example shown off at the recent developer conference was a Porsche with a BlackBerry entertainment system."
Native apps will always work better and be less resource intensive than HTML5 based apps. You will never be able to match native code or get even close. Even Google understands this on mobiles, even though they still use the crappy Java. This is especially important on mobile phones not only for limited CPU and memory and the lack of good GPU, but because battery life is really important and already not that great.
RIM just wants to do this because they don't have the vibrant app economy than Apple and even Microsoft has. They want others to do the work for them.
Well, the idea is good, but in the world of sheeple buying iphones and ipads which are nothing but closed ecosystem, RIM should know that they should just focus on marketing, advertisements and litigation to win the market.
What's good for consumer does not win, because consumers are morons.
Integrating functionality of BB10 into car dashboards comes from the fact that most of the OS developers were already working on dashboards in the same building, before RIM bought QNX.
Porche, Audi, BMW, among others have been running QNX for many years, and the software development for the infotainment systems has been done at the QNX head office. They already have the infrastructure and experienced developers to do this, so it only make sense to try to market it when the launch cost is low.
No release date. Already delayed over a year. Just RIM blowing smoke until they can kinda sorta maybe deliver a product.
With HTML5, write an app once and you're done. Currently you must create an app for iOS, Android, BB OS, Win Mobile, etc.
Besides, most popular apps on mobile devices are fetching information from websites anyway. Look at how many websites have apps. What's the point? Why should I load an app on my smartphone to access the same content by actually using the browser? I'm tired of seeing posts on websites like "hey, I can't get to this with my iPhone app". Why deal with keeping apps updated and working. It doesn't make sense.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
What we're seeing now is the beginning of the end of the end of RIM
Peace and Respect! Leonardez
High speed trading is done in Java because Java is actually fast enough, nowadays, and it is possible to write good enough quality code to do complex modelling. At my very inferior level, I have often knocked out little Swing applets in an hour or so to test an idea or model a process; nowadays I would probably do it in JS using a convenient xy plot environment I knocked up in a morning.
The upshot is that HTML5 means that you can economically produce little applications with a tiny user group. They won't be running long enough to deplete phone batteries, which in any case still suffer most from display and radio consumption.
But then - high user id and marketing bullshit ("vibrant app economy that Apple and even Microsoft has"). Since we heard just this week that MS isn't getting developers this is obviously a Microsoft PR troll. Welcome to your cubicle and good luck posting on Slashdot!
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Will it take them more or less time than Apple took to backpedal on this?
QNX is seen as a stable, RTOS microkernel for a variety of embedded applications.
QNX somehow never makes it big in the phone market.
iOS, Android, Blackberry, PalmOS, and Symbian start duking it out.
Blackberry starts using QNX and finally states it is going in the direction QNX should have gone 15 years ago instead of the iOpener and its "pizza button."
I am not surprised this has finally happened, but I am also not holding my breath it will succeed.
Three Step Plan:
1. Take over the world.
2. Get a lot of cookies.
3. Eat the cookies.
QNX is the OS of choice for many auto manufacturers for their in dash hardware. Since BB 10 is QNX with a new GUI layer (Kinda reminiscent of another OS X product and its BSD/OpenStep heritage) doesn't that just seem like a logical evolutionary step?
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Except the abstraction layer is often incomplete, failing to provide access to features of the hardware. For example, how should a web application access the camera and microphone of the device that the browser is running on (with the user's permission, of course)? Without camera access, for example, there is no way to make a barcode scanner.
Why does the Blackberry logo look like animal droppings?
The Porsche concept car is interesting. What most people don't realize about there cars is that almost all of them run the QNX somewhere in it. QNX is owned by RIMM and QNX ias the heart of BB10 (And the playbook).
The Porsche demo car jsut added to what the car could do already.
As for HTML 5, apps are already written in HTML quite often. It's not revolutionary. Also, Apple and Google are also pushing HTML 5 for app developemnt which is strange because that would weaken the barrier to entry accross the board.
Eventually, "smart phones" will by widgets like calculators. In the 80s, people probably said Brand X was the best but Brand Y saved you some money. Same deal with smart phones. In 20 years, no one will give a hoot.
And even if each platform gives access to the hardware layer, it's going to be different on each platform.
I thought the difference among a hypothetical Safari camera, a hypothetical Android Browser camera, and a hypothetical BB10 browser camera was something for JavaScript libraries to abstract. Let's make the features available to those libraries first though.
HTML5 is a fatal architectural design mistake for developing anything other than web sites.
HTML+CSS+JavaScript is a clunky necessary evil born of the nature of web development - not a desirable development environment.
HTML for mobile will always be slower and clunkier than an platform using C or Obj-C or C++ or even Java.
There is an unfounded myth that by using HTML, a wide audience of developers can be tapped while Apple has proven that the only thing that taps developers is a platform they can make money on - developers will learn whatever they need in order to eat.
Finally, using HTML does not guarantee automatic portability across devices in the same way that Android can't guarantee it across devices - there is a limit to how much hardware variation can be abstracted away and when hardware vendors compete on features there is a very strong force working against portability.
Palm failed because of this mistake, among others, and those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it.
WebOS had this model. Now it's gone. Apple had this model until they convinced Jobs to allow native apps. The number of apps soared, and you can see the success of native apps pushing a platform forward. Google even changes some of its webapps to native, for performance, API, and UI reasons.
This smells of coming from a point of weakness (Google is already changing some of its apps from native Blackberry to webapps).
That's not even mentioning that the Blackberry web browser makes me want to stick a fork in my eye (though the one in BB_OS 7.1 has improved to be merely very very bad).
I live in Waterloo, ON and know a lot of people that work for RIM. I constantly tell them my issues with the Black Berry. They turn around and explain the reason it is done that way. There seems to be an arrogance with the engineering base at RIM. It constantly is a "holding it wrong" response when all that means is I buy the device I want. They have not been catering to their user base for a really long time now. Telling me that I want to use html5 when I don't just shows this. When I think about it, it is probably done this way for security, but they should start looking to separate their business and consumer operating system.
The good: the "mobile ecosystem" really does have almost completely negative connotations at this point. It's not that running things locally is bad (sometimes you very much want to do just that), but rather that "ecosystem" became a codeword for screwing people over by trapping them in proprietary dead ends. The NES was an "ecosystem" by the current usage, and that was the epitome of evil next to which, even Microsoft looked like a relatively benign force in the software industry (until the Xbox, that is). Death to the mobile ecosystem. I know lots of people are actually working on that from various directions, but coming out and saying that's what you want to get rid of, earns RIM some points.
The bad: Porsche, are you serious? High-end car market will always be irrelevant. Whoever gets their computers and OSes into the Civics and Accords, Corrolas and Camries: that is who is going to win, and that's the system that eventually will show up in all the high-end cars unless you want the high-end cars to be a joke. Computers are cheap and any time you pretend they're expensive luxury items, it's just a way of announcing to the world, "Look at me, I'm a liar! Don't trust meeeee!" This is especially true in a car, as opposed to a phone, where you don't have the same physical size/weight constraints.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
If this is actually true it is tech news of the century. The mobile industry needs (badly) another Microsoft of the 1980's to come in and destroy all the poisonous platform fragmentation and walled gardens. If RIM is able to send apple back to the days of the slightly tolerable niche hipster/graphic design demographic I will sacrifice my first born in their honour.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
If they are depending on their hardware and OS to sell phones, their track record is not good.
They may suddenly leapfrog the competition in both those areas, but judging by the bag of crap they foisted on me, it will be one heck of a leap.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Open BB10 to GAPPS before your company goes fucking belly up, and another CEO whines he couldn't see it coming..
Problems in the "vigorous" developer community.
Bribing developers won't work with BB10 just like playbook
Leverage the old school capability of QNX.
If people cant do what they want with your device, it's a plastic toy not a tool.
It's like RIMM has everything going for it if it would only do the right thing. If they don't do the right thing soon, android will smash them into dust.
I had heard they are betting on Qt, not HTML5.
Google it.
...until developers got angry that they couldn't run native code. However, this might require that apps are only usable online and would prevent useful apps on an iPod Touch like device, not that RIM cares though.
Twinstiq, game news
QNX is junk, at least in RIM's hands. I've been a BlackBerry user for years, and I got a Playbook recently. It was a gift and I am not in the USA. After one week of very light use, the tablet froze for a couple of minutes. I got tired of waiting and forced a reboot.
The thing never worked again. It kept flashing red for a few days, then it won't even flash anymore. It's dead. Since I don't have the proof of purchase, I get no support unless *I pay* RIM some sort of "incident" fee. They screw up and I have to pay. Right?
I am not the only one. Google for it and you shall find quite a few other people who ran into the same problem. If you have the proof of purchase, you're only eligible for support for 90 days. After that, you're on your own. What a paragon of quality assurance and customer satisfaction.
So THAT is the incredibly amazing rock-stable OS that everyone has been talking about? Really? This paperweight I have here now? Please.
I foresee a string of QNX-based OS10 BB phones going belly up very suddenly, and a legion of irate customers shaking their fists and kicking themselves for still believing in RIM.
And I really raised my eyebrows at this part:
"...which would let them sell devices purely on the strength of the hardware and OS, rather than on the ecosystem."
Strength of the hardware???!!! Look, I've always enjoyed the excellent approach that RIM has always had to certain things, like the keyboard or email. But RIM has a notable history of skimping on hardware. I've ALWAYS had friends and other people around me have phones that had much better camera, better sound and more storage capacity. In fact, everything in other people's phones is usuallly better than my BlackBerry, except email. And those phones range all the way from the expensive iPhone to ridiculously cheap Chinese spin-offs sporting brands llike "Sumsang," "BleckBerry," or "HiPhone," whose operating system no one knows for sure what it is. Strength of the hardware? Please, don't write '"RIM" and "strength of the hardware" on the same sentence.
If I am a business owner wanting to be able to put food on the table by actually selling my application on the HTML app store how would I do that? Well I would have to host the credit card stuff, deal with PCI compliance and keeping my servers patched... oh wait I could pay someone to do that for me... well they have to be reputable so that people will give them their credit card number... but that means that the user has to type in his name, address, credit card number, and others in that tiny phone interface...
Where did this start again? Oh that is right, how would the developer/business put food on the table writing "apps" for the BB