Blackberry set to licence their android build to other manufacturers

After being one of the largest smartphone manufacturers in the world, Blackberry has been relatively obscure for the last few years. After dropping their Blackberry OS platform, they joined dozens of other manufacturers in making Android handsets, but with an enhanced focus on strong security. Despite this move to Android, Blackberry has remained a relatively small player in the current smartphone market.

An article in the India Times reports that an official within the company said that Blackberry was in talks with a number of device makers, including several within India, to license their Android build. The build would contain software based security enhancements made by Blackberry and would give more variety in the types of handsets for consumers to choose. They are calling this operating system and supporting ecosystem "Blackberry Secure."

Blackberry has already set a president in licensing their brand to three partners around the world in a similar fashion to the Nokia/HMD brand license. BlackBerry Senior Vice President, Alex Thurber, said "We have a number of different contracts that we are working on right now. We expect some to be announced soon." and he indicated that they weren't just looking at smartphones, "We have already started talking to a couple of medical manufacturers. John Chen [BlackBerry CEO] had also talked about TVs - there is an amazing amount of products that run Android and since we are able to make a very secure Android, we think there are a lot of opportunities."

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