They could stick to a tiny market share but not a profitable one.
The problem is you need a large team of developers for the operating system and designers and engineers for the hardware. This means thousands of employees. Do you know many phones you have to sell to pay the salaries of 2000+ employees? At least a million phones a year at a gross profit (retail price minus total cost of manufacturing) of $200 per phone.
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
You don’t need thousands of employees. The Lineage group provides the os. It need only be customized. LineageOS itself is 9 developers working part time as a hobby.
Hardware design is typically 3-5 people with 10 support staff. I’ve worked for a couple hardware startups.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
LineageOS is Android. If you use that then you’re not competing with Android, you’re joining it. The OP wants BlackBerry to provide an alternative to iOS and Android.
We’re not talking about hardware startups trying to build a minimum viable product, we’re talking about a company trying to market a product to regular consumers.
BlackBerry had a successful consumer product prior to the launch of the iPhone. Since then, the bar has been raised to the stratosphere and BlackBerry no longer comes even close. With thousands of employees they couldn’t do it.
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Android runs on Linux. That doesn’t make you Google. There’s no reason to reinvent the wheel.
It once worked for a publicly traded company. It was a few guys doing the custom Asics, one guy doing the board layout and two guys doing the software. This wasn’t a minimum viable product. It was a commercial product used by every large bank in the world.
Have you heard of Micronics motherboards? I knew the person who did their first motherboard. It was one person.