Enlarge / We've been watching smartphone operating systems burn out and fade away for the last year or two, and that's too bad. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)
A few days ago, BlackBerry CEO John Chen strongly implied that Android was the future of the company’s phones—he didn’t say BlackBerry 10 was finished, but future phones from the company are much more likely to resemble the not-entirely-awful BlackBerry Priv. Last week, Microsoft announced that Lumia sales had taken a big year-over-year tumble, and for the last year the company has been busy getting its software onto competing platforms while Windows Phone loyalists wait for a software update that seems like it will never come.
These two platforms were the best hope for a solid third-place mobile operating system, a fallback option for people unsatisfied by Android and iOS. But at this point it’s clear that the race for third place is over, not because somebody won, but because everybody lost.
BlackBerry 10 was perhaps doomed from the start. The first version came out just three years ago, well after Apple and Google and even Microsoft had all established their modern smartphone platforms. It’s clear that BlackBerry 10’s failure was a decision that the market made, and BlackBerry’s decision to pivot to Google-powered Android and focus more on its services is good evidence.
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