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It just isn’t BlackBerry’s year. The latest ‘nail in the coffin’ came today, with Google announcing it will pull the Gmail app from BlackBerry, so they can focus “efforts on building a great Gmail experience in the mobile browser” instead. BlackBerry browser? Great? Uh…Google? What are you playing at?
While it’s true that BlackBerry’s native email system is one of the best around, there were always a few problems when pushing Gmail through the BlackBerry’s email app, as spelled out here. Nonetheless, choice is a fine thing, as is that recognisable Gmail icon sitting on your toolbar.
From the 22nd of November the Gmail app will cease to exist in the BlackBerry World for new downloaders, but if you’ve already got it, then don’t expect to wake up and find it gone one day. Google just won’t be investing any time or money into supporting it, is all.
What Google plans to do with its webmail version of Gmail remains to be seen, but this can definitely be construed as Google wanting to move hardcore Gmail users over to the Android platform. Perhaps that’s what they were doing last week when they released the buggy iOS Gmail app? Hmm. [Google Support via ZDNet]
Image Credit: Crackberry
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I am sure they would love for all gmail users to use android, but this makes sense given the work they’ve been doing in changing gmail to be more any-screen friendly. The whole point of their gmail refresh was to make it renderable on big and little screens so why waste time and developers on supporting apps on other mobile OS? Especially when they are competing with your own product and, in the case of iOS/Apple, want to ex-ter-min-ate you.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this was their attitude towards all non-android OS going forward and may even be the way they go with android after Android 5.0 Jaffa cake comes out.
I’m not sure this makes sense. Since one of the side effects of G-mail on all platforms is data which is used to optimise searches. Certainly they may have decided to abandon Blackberry which is leaking users so badly it makes the Titanic look seaworthy, but the iOS userbase (which includes Touches and iPads remember) is large and also not so easy to rescue from the Evil clutches of Apple. Maybe the shitty App was a way of reminding people on iOS how much they depend on G-mail and what a problem it would be if it ever went away.
The only thing I have to say about this is I think Google are doing themselves a huge favor in killing gmail on Blackberry. Let’s face it, Blackberry is as dead as Nokia is (was..? tbc.)
The OS itself has always been highly lackluster, why would I want a SMARTphone (emphasis on smart) which is basically a text based GUI. They’re just generally not very good phones and haven’t had any form of REAL development since the first pearl came out.
The only thing they have ever been good at is encrypted emails and in my opinion, is why they should have always been stuck in businesses and not the general market.