Re: Agree with the title, but...
The problem with Blackphone is that it's just another non-mainstream platform. It may well have Android roots, but unless it hooks into Google Play Services and lets you run everything there is on the Google Store, people generally won't want it.
Mainstream sells. Non-mainstream does not. Unless the mainstream gets serious about security, nothing good will happen on a wide scale. Apple aren't too bad, but have their failings. Google seemingly hardly care at all about what happens on Android handsets people actually own. Neither have a commercial incentive to do anything about it. Nor do the app developers; it's hard enough supporting maybe both iOS and Android, but to pander to something like Blackphone too just costs time and effort for very little reward. That's exactly the problem Blackberry have; technically pretty good, know one cares.
I've said before that those whom really, really care about security (banks, governments, etc) have had a free ride on the Blackberry popularity wave. Now that Blackberry are less popular they're likely to discover that security costs. Without a mainstream consumer base to subsidise it that cost can become very high indeed. Like $billions.
With there being no one single completely compelling alternative out there no one really knows what to buy. There's solutions out there that have good security but effectively amount to locked down handsets where you cannot install anything personal or fun. Might as well carry a second phone then. There's solutions out there that are more permissive but consequently have more questionable security. There's clunky solutions that let you swap between a secure and a personal instance of the OS, but that's hardly the unified convenient solution that we need. Booking a meeting in a calendar then becomes a chore.
What everyone needs (even if they don't know it) is a proper, well developed multi-level security system in their mobile OS, not sticking plasters added on top. And there is one. It's called Blackberry Balance. But most IT people ignore that, probably because they don't know what a multi-level security system is or what it can do for them.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
