BlackBerry

• 1. Introduction

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  BlackBerry's name was selected from roughly 40 candidates by a marketing firm called Lexicon Branding. The firm chose it because the tiny keyboard buttons resembled the drupelets packed into a blackberry fruit. That whimsical origin sits at the start of a story involving presidents, police forces, intelligence agencies, and courtrooms. At its September 2011 peak, BlackBerry counted 85 million active subscribers worldwide. By March 2016, that number had fallen to 23 million, a decline of nearly three-quarters. How did a company from Waterloo, Ontario turn a humble two-way pager into a device that governments refused to give up? And how did it lose so much, so fast?

• 2. From Pager to Pocket

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  Research In Motion announced its first wireless device, the Inter@ctive Pager 900, on the 18th of September 1996. It was a clamshell design built for two-way paging. Following its success, IBM purchased a customized version called the Inter@ctive Pager 800, buying US$10 million worth on the 4th of February 1998. The next model, the Inter@ctive Pager 950, arrived on the 26th of August 1998. The first device to bear the BlackBerry name was the 850, an email pager released on the 19th of January 1999. Though the 850 and the 950 looked identical, the 850 was the first to integrate email directly. The name Inter@ctive Pager disappeared with it.

  RIM designed BlackBerry as a system for delivering email across multiple wireless networks, starting with the Mobitex network. The key innovation was an "always on" connection: messages arrived the moment they were sent, without any manual checking. Pushing messages to a device the moment they are sent, rather than waiting for the user to check, is now called push notifications. BlackBerry pioneered this practice. The keyboard, designed for typing with thumbs alone, introduced a habit that would long outlast the brand.

  By 2002, RIM advanced beyond pagers into mobile phones with the BlackBerry 5810, a GSM handset using GPRS for email and web access. RIM brought the BlackBerry to Europe in September 2001. There, SMS text messaging was already well established, and the device found less initial appeal than it had in North America.

• 3. The Government's Device

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  RIM's reputation for secure communications attracted an unexpected anchor customer: the US government became BlackBerry's biggest single client. In Canada, Toronto and many other municipalities issued BlackBerry devices to employees across transportation, water services, operations, and management. South West Trains and Northern Rail in the United Kingdom gave the devices to train guards to improve communication between control, guards, and passengers. West Yorkshire Police found that officers could handle desk paperwork directly from the street, reducing public spending in the process. The Bangalore City Police was among the handful of Indian police departments to adopt the devices, alongside the Pune Police and Kochi Police.

  Barack Obama's use of his BlackBerry during the 2008 presidential campaign became one of the more visible endorsements the brand ever received. After taking office, he insisted on keeping the device despite security concerns. Marketing experts estimated his continued use was equivalent to between $25 million and $50 million in celebrity endorsement value. The brand's hold on government was deep enough to become a policy fact. In 2013, a State Department spokesperson confirmed that BlackBerry was still the only mobile device approved for US missions abroad.

  In February 2009, the 'Ndrangheta, an Italian criminal organization, was reported to have used BlackBerry Messenger to contact the Gulf Cartel in Mexico. The group relied on it because BBM messages were described as "very difficult to intercept." Hillary Clinton continued using her BlackBerry after becoming Secretary of State. That choice would later draw her into a prolonged controversy over classified communications on private devices.

• 4. The $612 Million Case

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  In 2000, a company called NTP Inc. sent wireless email patent notices to several companies and offered licensing terms. Research In Motion was among those that declined. NTP filed a patent infringement lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. That court was known in legal circles as the "rocket docket," a reference to its strict timetables and efficiency in patent cases. The jury found that RIM had infringed the NTP patents and that the infringement had been willful. Original damages were set at US$33 million. Judge James R. Spencer increased the figure to US$53 million as a punitive measure. He also ordered RIM to pay NTP's legal fees of US$4.5 million. Spencer then issued an injunction requiring RIM to shut down BlackBerry's systems in the United States. The injunction was stayed while RIM appealed.

  In March 2005, the two sides attempted a settlement at $450 million. Negotiations collapsed. In November 2005, the US Department of Justice filed a brief asking that RIM's service be allowed to continue. The DOJ cited the large number of BlackBerry users across the US Federal Government. On the 9th of February 2006, the US Department of Defense weighed in with its own brief. The DOD argued that any shutdown exempting government users was unworkable and called the BlackBerry crucial for national security. On the 3rd of March 2006, after a stern warning from Judge Spencer, RIM and NTP reached a settlement. RIM agreed to pay US$612.5 million, which both sides described as a full and final settlement of all claims. No future royalties on the technology were attached to the agreement. Some analysts considered the sum lower than expected for that reason.

  A separate legal dispute with Qualcomm resolved in BlackBerry's favor. In 2017, an arbitration panel ordered Qualcomm to pay BlackBerry US$940 million, including interest and attorneys' fees.

• 5. Peak, CrackBerry, and Collapse

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  The BlackBerry Curve became the best-selling smartphone in the United States in 2009. That same year, Research In Motion ranked first on Fortune's list of the Fastest Growing Companies. The company held 56 percent of the American smartphone market. Sales had tripled between 2007 and 2009. The term CrackBerry, coined to describe the device's addictive hold on users, was formally recognized by Webster's New World College Dictionary in 2006. That year, the global subscriber base stood at roughly 4.9 million. By February 2009, it had reached 25 million.

  The BlackBerry Pearl, released in September 2006, had been the turning point. It drew mainstream consumers beyond the traditional enterprise audience for the first time. BlackBerry Messenger, launched around the same time, let users exchange encrypted messages, voice notes, images, and videos via BlackBerry PIN. No extra charge applied beyond a standard data plan.

  E. L. James wrote Fifty Shades of Grey on her BlackBerry. Eric Schmidt, who served as Executive Chairman of Google from 2001 to 2011, said in a 2013 interview that he preferred BlackBerry's keyboard. He did so even as Android, which Google produced, competed directly with the platform. Kim Kardashian said at the 2014 Code/Mobile conference that BlackBerry had "my heart and soul." She admitted to keeping a personal supply of BlackBerry Bold phones out of fear they would go extinct.

  Device sales peaked in 2011. After that, Android and iOS cut deeply into BlackBerry's numbers. On the 20th of September 2013, BlackBerry announced it was cutting 4,500 positions, approximately 40 percent of its operating staff. Its product line shrank from six models to four. By Q4 of 2016, BlackBerry sold only 207,900 units worldwide, a market share that registered effectively zero.

  In Indonesia, BlackBerry had once commanded 43 percent of all smartphone shipments in 2011. By April 2014, that share had fallen to just 3 percent.

• 6. Surveillance and Its Limits

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  Research In Motion agreed in 2010 to grant the governments of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia access to private user communications. India received the same access in 2012. Both governments had demanded it by threatening to ban BlackBerry services outright. Their law enforcement agencies could not decrypt messages passing between users of interest.

  The 2013 mass surveillance disclosures confirmed that the reach extended further. The American NSA and the British GCHQ had both accessed BlackBerry user data. The NSA could read BlackBerry email and SMS traffic. A gap appeared in 2009 when the NSA temporarily lost access after BlackBerry changed how it compressed data. GCHQ restored that access and built a tool it called SCRAPHEAP CHALLENGE. Internal documents described the tool as capable of "perfect spoofing of emails from BlackBerry targets."

  The vulnerability lay in the BlackBerry Internet Service, which compressed but did not encrypt data flowing outside corporate networks. BlackBerry officials denied that any "back door pipeline" to the platform had been established.

  BlackBerry's own software, however, included support for an encryption algorithm called Dual EC DRBG. The US National Institute of Standards and Technology "strongly recommended" against using it, citing evidence of a probable NSA backdoor. BlackBerry did not issue a customer advisory because the company did not consider the probable backdoor a vulnerability. BlackBerry Ltd. also held US patent 2007189527, which covered the technical design of that same backdoor.

• 7. The Licensing Era

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  On the 28th of September 2016, BlackBerry Limited announced it would stop designing its own devices. Three licensees took over the brand. BB Merah Putih covered the Indonesian market and Optiemus Infracom handled South Asia. BlackBerry Mobile, a trade name of TCL Technology, served all other markets globally.

  The last device designed in-house by BlackBerry was the KeyOne, released in 2017. It combined a physical keyboard with a 4.5-inch touchscreen and was recognized for its long battery life. In June 2018, the Key2 was launched in international markets through a partnership of BlackBerry Mobile, TCL, and Optiemus Infracom. It featured a dual camera setup with portrait mode and optical zoom.

  By 2020, all licensed BlackBerry products had ceased production. An American licensee that had announced plans for a new device shut down in 2022 without releasing anything. On the 4th of January 2022, BlackBerry Limited discontinued its legacy software services: email, BlackBerry Messenger, BlackBerry World, BlackBerry Protect, and Voice Search. BlackBerry devices running Android were not affected. The company pivoted to software and services, retaining a portfolio of critical software application patents as its primary business. A dramatized film account of the company's history, titled Blackberry and directed by Matt Johnson, arrived in 2023. It was adapted from the book Losing the Signal, written by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff.