With the continuing success of BlackBerry's newest flagship, the Priv, is it time for the company to switch firmware and platform?
According to the Economic Times, some of the executives at BlackBerry believe that the Android platform is the future for the company. At the launch of the BlackBerry Priv in India last week, the industry follower quoted Damian Tay, senior director, APAC product management at BlackBerry as saying, "The Priv device is essentially our transition to Android ecosystem. As we secure Android, over a period of time, we would not have two platforms, and may have only Android as a platform [for smartphones]."
However, reiterating BlackBerry CEO John Chen's statements earlier this year, Tay also mentioned that other company iterations running BlackBerry's own platform, BB10, are still available. "But for now, we have BB10 and Android platforms for our smartphones."
When asked earlier this year if the success of the Priv would make BlackBerry transition fully into the Android environment, Chen wrote on the official BlackBerry blog that the BlackBerry 10 OS is far from dead. While it is true that there will be new BlackBerry devices running Android – one is slated to appear later this year, codenamed "Vienna" – the current BlackBerry lineups running the company's homegrown platform will still get updates and security patches.
This means that BlackBerry's focus for this year will be two-pronged. As iterations such as the Classic and Passport receive BB OS 10.3.3 and a number of new updates, the company is also set to fully immerse itself in the Android environment with the outing of another flagship running the OS.
However, according to Tay, the outing of the BlackBerry Priv already signaled the company's gradual transition into Android. According to Phone Arena, Tay also stated, "The future is really Android. We went for Android essentially for its app ecosystem. In addition, all the enterprise solutions that we have been doing have been cross-platform for a long time now. So it's a natural progression toward Android."
