BlackBerry phones were once the default choice for enterprise, the combination of physical keyboard and secure messaging facility the two key selling-points. Those days are long gone.
The company dismissed the iPhone when it was launched in 2007, claiming that touchscreen phones could never compete with physical keyboards – before doing a U-turn by launching its own touchscreen phone less than a year later. A series of major service outages and a failure to deliver the promised BlackBerry 10 in 2011 sealed the company’s fate as a major player, and it today appears set to completely cede the secure messaging space to Apple.
BlackBerry CEO John Chen effectively admitted in December that the company had a ‘backdoor’ into its supposedly secure messaging system, and the company has now stated that it will this year make only Android phones – a platform not noted for its security credentials. This shortly after Microsoft’s Windows Phone looked even more irrelevant, the company reporting that revenues had halved year-on-year …
While BB10-powered phones remain on sale for the moment, there seems little prospect that BlackBerry would make only Android phones this year before resuming production of BB10 phones later. The BB10 ‘secure’ platform is now living on borrowed time.
While BlackBerry is reportedly working hard to persuade government customers that its Android-powered phones can also be secure, there seems little realistic prospect of the company selling this message to corporate customers. Android’s history is littered with major security flaws.
We’re not talking flaws that affect a small number of apps, or issues that permit only limited access to attackers, but multiple examples of malware that impacts almost every app and allows an attacker to take complete control of a phone. Against this type of background, and a deliberate policy to build in a backdoor, it seems hard to see how BlackBerry could realistically present Android-powered phones as a secure platform.
Apple has a massive advantage over Android manufacturers, controlling both hardware and software and – jailbroken devices aside – deciding what apps are and aren’t allowed to run on iPhones. That level of hardware and software integration provides a unique level of security, for example banking apps which can use Touch ID but have no access to fingerprint data, merely asking the Secure Enclave for a yes/no answer on whether a valid fingerprint has been used.
That doesn’t mean that iOS devices are immune to malware – they aren’t. But significant issues are extremely rare, and on those occasions they do occur, Apple is able to act swiftly to solve the problem.
Apple has also adopted an absolutely unwavering commitment to the principle that user security and privacy overrides the desire governments have for backdoor access. Apple’s attitude is, quite rightly, that if you deliberately build a weakness into a platform for use by the good guys, it’s only a matter of time before it is discovered and exploited by the bad guys.
That commitment is built into Apple’s systems. iOS 8 introduced strong encryption into iPhones and iPads, meaning that even if a law enforcement official comes knocking on Apple’s door with a locked iPhone and a court order demanding that Apple break into it, the company will be unable to do so.
The same is true of iMessages and FaceTime calls. Both use end-to-end encryption, meaning that not even Apple could intercept and decrypt the messages because – as Tim Cook told Charlie Rose back in 2014 – “we don’t have the key.”
Apple has been criticized for this approach by numerous government and law enforcement agencies – among them the United States Attorney General, the FBI, the DOJ, the Homeland Security Committee and CIA and more. Apple has been accused of everything from protecting child abusers to facilitating terrorists. To its credit, Apple has resisted all such pressure, Tim Cook saying last year that we should not “give in to scare-mongering.”
9to5Mac readers strongly support Apple’s position, some 93% of you stating that the company is right to stand firm on encryption, with only 3.5% opposed.
If enterprises aren’t satisfied with that, they also have the option of an even more secure platform built on top of iOS by some noted former jailbreakers.
With Windows Phone sliding into irrelevance; the BB10 platform on the way out; BlackBerry admitting to building in a backdoor vulnerability; and its switch to a platform which has a very poor track-record for security, it seems to me that iOS is now the only sensible choice for anyone – enterprise and individual alike – looking for a secure communications platform.
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
“Apple has been criticized for this approach by numerous government and law enforcement agencies – among them the United States Attorney General, the FBI, the DOJ, the Homeland Security Committee and CIA and more. Apple has been accused of everything from protecting child abusers to facilitating terrorists. To its credit, Apple has resisted all such pressure, Tim Cook saying last year that we should not “give in to scare-mongering.””
And this is where BlackBerry will get the Governments to sign up for their Android phones.
The ironic part is that governments have much information they wish to keep secret (for reasons both good and bad). Thus Apple’s insistence on strong encryption should make iPhones more valuable.
“With Windows Phone sliding into irrelevance . . . ”
I believe RIM / BlackBerry started this slide many years ago when they thought they owned the Enterprise market and could dismiss Apple’s iPhone as a passing fad. IMO – Their product pinnacle was the Bold: everything after that was a poor compromise or a less-than-successful copycat product.
Goodbye BlackBerry – I won’t miss you!
Blackberry as a stand alone entity is finished – as you say. Does it have future running Android? The lack of an app. store even vaguely competitive with IOS or Android was surely a part of their downfall, so may be Android will save them. Lets see.
On the subject of so called ‘backdoor.’ Blackberry spent decades proving Apple’s position on encryption to be a lie. The self same Blackberry messaging that allowed legitimate law enforcement access – yes, for for those child molesters etc – was also so secure that it was the mandatory go to system for the highest security users in government and commerce. Of course, it’s not just Blackberry: other responsible corporations do the same thing.
Apple’s claim that they cannot provide security without obstructing law enforcement is a plain lie and needs to be challenged.
“and needs to be challenged”
Certainly the best way to “challenge” it is to copy/paste the same comment into every security-related 9-to-5 post from now until the end of time. Great work, keep it up!
Blackberry’s security theater you mean, as government and corporate users alike are now and have been incapable in the past of doing a significant security audit on the platform. Every government in the world can be assumed to have unfettered access to all communication that passes through a BB device – this is not recent news and should have been obvious to anyone when RIM tangled with India and caved.
The iPhone is secure and needs to stay that way. No back doors for anyone, regardless of the perceived threats.
By the way, why did you not use your real last name “Chen” for these posts?
Hmmm…not sure this is necessarily true. The new Blackberry Priv has been wildly popular — stores are having difficulty keeping up with demand, and they are shipping a lot of units — more than BB has sold in years. And the privacy settings are second to none. Much more secure than Apple purports to have. I switched from an iPhone 6S to the Priv, and I love it (though I don’t particularly like Android).
I administer multiple phones in my office which needs to be HIPPA-compliant for medical records — and almost all of my employees have switched to the new Priv, and all of them away from the iPhone.
Granted, its not all about security — its also about the keyboard which makes entering unique information much faster and more accurate than the iPhone’s predictive touch keyboard —
But to say that Apple has the security market covered — not at all.
I cannot personally understand what looking at Alicia Keys (in the associated article photo) has to do with enterprise, unless, of course, one particular enterprise is involved in her management.
I used to work in a BB only shop. At the time my own phone was a Motorola “dumb phone”. They gave me a Blackberry 8500, my first exposure to a “smart phone”. Within a few weeks I realized I hated it. I hated everything about it. 8 or 9 months later they replaced it with another BB, I forget the model but it was newer than the 8500. Made no difference. I hated it too. The store was useless. The browser was useless. The screen was miserable. The keyboard was a tiny chucklet thing that was way to small for my fingers. I ended up carrying my company phone and my own phone and used the latter whenever I could. Finally I hid and disabled everything on the BB but phone, messaging, and mail. Mail was also terrible but I had to use it for work. A couple of years later I left that job and BlackBerrys behind. How bad were they? I only got my first “smart phone” an iPhone 5C, last year. My experience with BB convinced me that the whole concept was flawed and I shouldn’t waste my money. The 5C showed me how wrong that was. They got everything right that BB got wrong.
I may be Canadian but as far as I’m concerned BB can rot.