BlackBerry Won’t Return – OnwardMobility Reportedly Loses Brand License

BlackBerry phones will remain dead.

In 2020, we reported on the startup OnwardMobility, which licensed the BlackBerry brand for smartphones and planned to release a new QWERTY Android phone. There was little to worry about when the company missed a promised 2021 deadline and just last month had to publish a blog post titled “Contrary to popular belief, we are not dead.”Android Police, Kevin Mikhalyuk

In late January, BlackBerry sold its mobile device and messaging patents to a new company called Catapult IP Innovations, which has no products and has taken on a ton of debt to buy the patents. If Catapult’s plan is to monetize BlackBerry’s patents by suing potential infringers, it’s understandable that BlackBerry wants to distance itself from the years of legal battles that are about to begin.

BlackBerry pulled out of the smartphone market in 2016 after betting on the Android-powered BlackBerry Priv and losing. However, smartphone brands never die; they are simply licensed to other companies and become zombie brands. Chinese firm TCL licensed its name from 2016 to 2020, and after the contract expired, OnwardMobility was set to be next.

to the site a blog post stating that the device did not die.

OnwardMobility hasn’t confirmed the loss of the BlackBerry license, but in its latest blog post, it appears to be going out of its way to not mention BlackBerry. We would ask OnwardMobility for a comment, but the company does not have public email addresses. So far, nothing has gone according to OnwardMobility’s plan, and it’s no wonder the company is quietly dying. In fact, the real “BlackBerry”thing that OnwardMobility can do is get out of the smartphone market.