At BlackBerry Live – an annual event focusing on the Blackberry platform – CEO Thorsten Heins introduced the latest version of BlackBerry OS, BB10.1.
Heins also told attendees that Moog will be bringing its synthesizer app Animoog, previously exclusive to iOS, to the BB10 platform. Moog shared an image, right, that shows Animoog working on Blackberry.
The huge growth in mobile music apps has left some Android-using musicians and developers frustrated, because of years of inaction on Google’s part to address latency issues on Android. Latency is enough of a problem on the platform that music app developers have focused on iOS, despite a larger possible audience on the Android platform.
Animoog is one of the most advanced mobile synthesizers available on iOS, so the fact that it has been ported to Blackberry is notable.
What do you make of the announcement? Do you think Blackberry could be a viable alternative for musicians interested in mobile music-making?
Connectivity will be the key issue..
How matured is Blackberry-world in that regard?
Certainly more open than any Apple device…
If you want to hook stuff up to your mobile device and actually have it do something useful, iOS is way ahead.
Yes, Robert. A useful comment that very clearly illustrates why Apple so badly lag behind Android, Windows and Blackberry in mobile OS audio/midi applications.
I didn’t know you could connect a Blackberry to your synth via MIDI…
Oh wait, you can’t….
The #2 position for mobile music platform is still wide open, so anyone could take it, as long as these requirements are met:
– Devices are affordable enough to achieve a critical mass in a meaningfully short time
– All devices from said company are powerful enough to run feature rich apps. (unlike many low end cheap android devices)
– There are enough standards in place to ensure that carriers don’t dramatically alter the performance of deployed devices, and then never allow OS updates.
Microsoft can’t seem to gain enough consumer interest to take this position, and Google’s “open” platform has ensured enough device fragmentation to hold it from gaining this position. However, I doubt Blackberry will gain enough consumer interest to be a significant player, and I expect they will battle it out for #3 with Microsoft. Android will remain the dominant platform for people who don’t really care about apps and don’t want to spend much money on the device, and Apple will remain the dominant platform for people who want a lot of apps. I expect the “#2 position for mobile musicians” will be a scattering of custom made devices built on the android platform, but which can’t be considered “android”. Collectively they will add up to #2, but they will not be a unified platform. Microsoft could be a contender here if it dropped the metro interface and started producing a more affordable and user-friendly mobile device.
Blackberry doesn’t have a chance.
Android (especially Samsung) meets the needs of people that want a ‘good enough’ & cheap clone of the iPhone.
Apple’s got most of the power user crowd locked up – the people that want a powerful mobile device, without a lot of risk or hassle. This is where the bulk of the money is in the phone industry.
Android beats iOS among the power users that value managing their system manually and that have the technical knowledge to do so.
WIndows Phone is a good platform, but it’s trying to compete directly against Apple and failing. Apple’s lock on the most valuable slice of the market keeps growing.
This leaves Blackberry competing with Windows Phone for the scraps – so there won’t be enough users to entice music app developers to put out Blackberry apps.
A while ago, I was reading about their new BB TEN OS…
The OS is based on QNX :a well established realtime OS used in cars, industrial computers, routeurs and stuffs.
IT’S BASED ON A M_THERF__KING REALTIME OS, it’s engineered for latency and fast interprocess comunication!!
And since there’s few models of BB phones, apps don’t rely on Dalvik VM for compatibility (windows phones use something similar: CLI .net)… Apps can be/are compiled in fast and efficient native code as in iOS, with very well establish operating parameters (uniform hardware/software/drivers…)
All in all, from what I understand, I think the OS itself might be at least as good as iOS for music apps. The underlying architecture of the OS and the slightly more open than iOS might make it a killer platform for portable audio apps.
It is very promising plateform for audio apps and kudos to the Animoog team!
But blackberry hardware? Not so sure. It seems OK, but…
Apple make such awesome hardware, purely specs wise it’s not always the best but it’s always the most REFINED. I work in computer graphics (FXs for movies), I can attest that their screens color calibrations and reproduction is well above anything… Closer to expensive studio monitors than the other tablets and smartphones! This lack of half-assery is why I pay the many Apple taxes: the object itself and the closed gardens of apps.
91% of mobile malware is on Android, the rest is on Symbian. 0% is on iOS
http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Q1-2013-Game-Changer-for-Android-Malware-1790298.htm
The technology will be available across all platforms soon, so why even argue over this crap?
moogmusic takes on BB 10, even in less than 150characters tweets, is definitely more credible than mine.
Here:
=========
rodgermettenday How much did #RIM pay #MOOG to develop this great music making app for… #Whitecollar #blackberry users?
moogmusic @rodgermettenday the BB10 platform is very powerful and allows us to make a great creative expressive tool for BB users. We develop instruments for every color of collar. No discriminating at Moog.
Kevin Chartier, the developer who ported MorphWiz and Tachyon to BlackBerry claimed at the time that it’s actually a better platform than iOS because of its real-time OS, which iOS does not have. I still never understood the business sense in it, and probably never will.
I got the impression that this port was done because it was ‘fun’ … due to the fact that the result was good. I got the impression that the Android port by contrast was ‘not fun’, due to the general impossibility of making the instruments actually usable due to their latency (touch, audiobuffer sizes, and computational throughput, scheduling — all of these have to come out right, or even an infinite amount of compute power in the device won’t make it playable).
From what I understood, development for blackberry is in C and C++, iOS apps are also done with that AND objective C (an extension of C mostly use by Xcode).
Kevin Chartier probably did the ports super fast because most code was already written in some flavor of C and the hardware target were known. It was probably a fraction of the effort than an android version. Even if BB market share is now close to non-existant, that might explain the business sense of these ports.
I’d really like to see what developers could push with BB realtime os.
With linux Realtime kernel patch, you can get latency under 3m, pretty insane.
Meanwhile, I get crappy and annoying latency with the integrated soundcard and asio4all on my windows machine! I totally get your point about scheduling, infinite compute power and stuff : my computer is actually a dual quad-core Xeon workstation with a shit-ton of ram and super fast hdds! But unlike a cell phone, I could just buy a real soundcard with asio drivers to fix that.
The code that Kevin contributed to Geo used some Objective-C, and in the code that I originally contributed avoided Objective-C as much as possible and I used C++ not at all. When he ported his apps to Android, Blackberry, WinRT; he gave the impression that he completely avoided non-C code (no C++, no Objective-C) in the portable core that talked to a back-end-per-platform that had a C front-face and did whatever it had to behind that.
The NodeBeat developer actually ported OpenFrameworks to BlackBerry so that he could deploy on Android,iOS,BB at the same time; which benefited other developers. I remember that he also thought that the technical merits of BB for this were very real because of the good timing qualities. This is kind of amazing, because the BB devices they were using were $200 devices vs the iPad. But with audio apps, you go for “good enough” throughput, pretty good battery life, and best latency. With desktop operating systems, they have priorities of throughput first, latency second, and never thinking about power consumption at all.
Thanks for the insights,
I’m not a programmer but I’m really interested by all this. A few years ago I used to work as a 3D technical director for a iOS/facebook game developper. The two iOS programmers where probably the most creatives and interesting persons of the lot! One recently quited his programming job and became a stand-up comedian! They got me interested about whats possible even on limited hardware.