How I built the best-selling BlackBerry app
In this technical retrospective (2020), @nsainsbury shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Pandemic Bubble (2020–2022)
COMMUNITY SCORE 234 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 68 comments
blackberry was the case of 'not knowing any better'.
i never had to use one for work but blackberry was my first smart phone, it came with a truly unlimited plan from verizon.
here are some fond memories of it:
- i got notification that new OS was available, i did an over the air update and it wiped 90% of my contacts. i came from dumbphones and remember i had to re-enter 100 or so contacts by hand, i don't think i ever upgraded the SW on it again.
- went out to HH with some friends and getting ready to go home i thought of using the internet on my fancy BB to look up the bus schedule, i pulled up the cttransit website and it would not open the .pdf with the bus time natively, it pointed me to buying some pdf viewer for something like $25. at the same time, my co-workers iphone 3G or whatever it was, opened the pdf without any additional apps.
so much for a "computer" in your pocket and being all about "business and not play", the stereotypical mantra of old crackberry.com. i think the next year on valentines verizon got the iphone 4 and that was the end of blackberry for me.
i can't believe people have nostalgia for this garbage phone.
Give people extensibility and they can do things you'd never imagine: just take a look at the early jailbreaking community, who had neither APIs nor support from Apple but were able to do quite a bit just by being able to inject code into system applications to augment them. (I like to think that a faint echo lives on today in Mail plugins for macOS.) Sadly, we seem to be moving away from this for reasons that are touted to be for security…
It's ironic to think that one of the main selling points of Blackberry was end-to-end security (the devices talked to an on-premises server via a dedicated mobile APN which had to comply with a number of requirements), and yet its on-device security model allowed an app to take over such critical functionality _by design_.
I have a number of fun stories about RIM (I was one of the BB product managers at a telco), and this post reminded me that it might be a good time to record them for posterity... :)
Ha, snap! We did the same with the PhoneListener(?) class and our PBX client. Allowed us to cancel and make calls, send DTMF for call-back and call-through. I also had my own app which sent calls straight to speakerphone.
I look back on BB with alot of nostalgia, you really had to work to make things look good. If you didn't want your Views (widgets) black, white and blue then you were making them from scratch.
This was such a fun walk down nostalgia lane. The mountain of hacks both available and required on BlackBerry was incredible.
I worked at a startup that built a BlackBerry app in 2007. I wrote up my experience here: https://schlu.org/2014/05/29/Things-Are-Better.html ↗