from Hacker News

How I built the best-selling BlackBerry app

by nsainsbury on 3/9/20, 5:53 AM with 68 comments

• by rcarmo on 3/9/20, 1:29 PM

  It's ironic to think that one of the main selling points of Blackberry was end-to-end security (the devices talked to an on-premises server via a dedicated mobile APN which had to comply with a number of requirements), and yet its on-device security model allowed an app to take over such critical functionality _by design_.

  I have a number of fun stories about RIM (I was one of the BB product managers at a telco), and this post reminded me that it might be a good time to record them for posterity... :)

• by saagarjha on 3/9/20, 9:15 AM

  > Critically, from that handler, it was then possible to get a reference to the current UI stack via the call to UiApplication.getUiApplication() - Once you had that reference, you could do whatever you want with any screens in the current display stack. You could pop screens from the stack, push new screens on the stack, and grab any screen in the stack and dig in and modify any of the UI components on any screen (deleting them, replacing them, etc.).

  Give people extensibility and they can do things you'd never imagine: just take a look at the early jailbreaking community, who had neither APIs nor support from Apple but were able to do quite a bit just by being able to inject code into system applications to augment them. (I like to think that a faint echo lives on today in Mail plugins for macOS.) Sadly, we seem to be moving away from this for reasons that are touted to be for security…

• by bb101 on 3/9/20, 11:39 AM

  Perhaps it's just nostalgia, but I miss my BlackBerry Bold.

  A buzz in the pocket, email symbol on the screen, main button to open the email, right-click button to forward, physical scroll to a recent colleague and select, lock & back in pocket.

  All that before 3G. Easy, quick and no fuss, muscle memory took care of most of it.

• by ir77 on 3/9/20, 9:10 PM

  blackberry was the case of 'not knowing any better'.

  i never had to use one for work but blackberry was my first smart phone, it came with a truly unlimited plan from verizon.

  here are some fond memories of it:

  - i got notification that new OS was available, i did an over the air update and it wiped 90% of my contacts. i came from dumbphones and remember i had to re-enter 100 or so contacts by hand, i don't think i ever upgraded the SW on it again.

  - went out to HH with some friends and getting ready to go home i thought of using the internet on my fancy BB to look up the bus schedule, i pulled up the cttransit website and it would not open the .pdf with the bus time natively, it pointed me to buying some pdf viewer for something like $25. at the same time, my co-workers iphone 3G or whatever it was, opened the pdf without any additional apps.

  so much for a "computer" in your pocket and being all about "business and not play", the stereotypical mantra of old crackberry.com. i think the next year on valentines verizon got the iphone 4 and that was the end of blackberry for me.

  i can't believe people have nostalgia for this garbage phone.

• by swypych on 3/9/20, 11:22 AM

  I love these stories, Neil was basically able to create a business on what essentially amounts to hack.

• by dmix on 3/9/20, 4:06 PM

  I see it also had basic emojis or "smiley" support, heh. I like the simplicity of it all, ignoring all of the obvious security issues.

  https://i.imgur.com/ho3XV6q.png

• by dangerscouse on 3/9/20, 5:37 PM

  Ha, snap! We did the same with the PhoneListener(?) class and our PBX client. Allowed us to cancel and make calls, send DTMF for call-back and call-through. I also had my own app which sent calls straight to speakerphone.

  I look back on BB with alot of nostalgia, you really had to work to make things look good. If you didn't want your Views (widgets) black, white and blue then you were making them from scratch.

• by schlu on 3/9/20, 1:47 PM

  This was such a fun walk down nostalgia lane. The mountain of hacks both available and required on BlackBerry was incredible.

  I worked at a startup that built a BlackBerry app in 2007. I wrote up my experience here: https://schlu.org/2014/05/29/Things-Are-Better.html

• by Havoc on 3/9/20, 1:25 PM

  That's a cool write-up.

  Interesting how one small piece of technical knowledge changed someone's life

• by imafish on 3/9/20, 10:14 AM

  But how much did it make? :D

• by animalnewbie on 3/9/20, 1:26 PM

  BB10 and Windows Phone 8 were the victims of the apple Google duopoly but both were individually far ahead of them. I still have hope Microsoft would make a comeback. I could hope that BB open sources BB10 but that is not going to happen.