BlackBerry Internet Service™ replacement
On 4 January 2022, BlackBerry® shut down their BlackBerry® Infrastructure. This included BlackBerry Internet Service™, which enabled BlackBerry® smartphones using BlackBerry® OS 7 and below (those released before 5 February 2013) to access the Internet and to send and receive emails.
Despite it being increasingly difficult to use a BlackBerry® smartphone, there remains a significant fanbase on websites such as CrackBerry and Reddit. Because I’m a fan myself, I’m eager to keep the original experience going for as long as I can.
To do this, I’m beginning to reverse engineer how BlackBerry Internet Service™ worked. If all goes well, I hope to build a replacement for BlackBerry Internet Service™ that can be used by anybody with a BlackBerry® smartphone for a small monthly fee.
Roadmap
My first step will be to understand BlackBerry® Infrastructure, BlackBerry® Device Software insofar as it relates to BlackBerry® Infrastructure, and how the two work together to provide the BlackBerry® solution.
Following that, I’ll build a proof of concept. This will include:
- Device provisioning and activation
- PIN messaging between devices
When I’ve proven that building a replacement is possible, I’ll then build a minimum viable product (MVP). This will include:
- Sending and receiving email messages using an existing email address
- Accessing webpages using the BlackBerry® Browser
When I’ve built the core concepts, I’ll then build them out to support:
- BlackBerry® email addresses
- Receiving HTML emails
- Sending and receiving email attachments
When the MVP has reached an acceptable level of functionality, I’d also like to work, in this order, on looking at whether it’d be feasible to build replacements for:
- BlackBerry® Protect
- BlackBerry® Maps
- BlackBerry® Messenger
- BlackBerry® App World