The post regarding plans for Path on BlackBerry which was picked up from Path CEO Dave Morin’s interview with TV One on Friday morning apparently caused quite a stir among tech blogs around the world and a lot of BlackBerry fans seemed pretty happy and excited about it, but it’s best to hang on to that thought because we’re about to pour cold water on that news item.
We had a long discussion with Dave Morin who is currently in Jakarta with Path’s business development Tamara Steffens, and he helped clear up some of the things that were said on the TV interview on Friday morning.
Indonesia is apparently home to four million Path users, nearly all of whom are very active and according to Morin, are responsible for half of the activities on Path’s entire network on a daily basis. In other words, 50 percent of Path’s daily active users are from Indonesia.
To clarify and correct a statement produced earlier on DailySocial, with the four million active members, Indonesia is not the third largest nation on Path, it’s the largest, followed by the United States. On a monthly basis, Indonesia contributes to 30 percent of the traffic, with the United States also making up 30 percent, and the rest of the world sharing the remaining 40 percent.
Indonesia is also home to perhaps the remaining BlackBerry stronghold on the planet. BlackBerry has seen its global marketshare dwindle significantly in large numbers, apparently leaving it with around one percent of the market this past quarter, having shipped only 2.5 million devices according to Strategy Analytics.
BlackBerry’s position in Indonesia however remains relatively strong. Sales and device activations may be slowing down according to mobile carriers but it’s still growing regardless. Therefore, for some people it may make sense to see Path and BlackBerry join up.
Morin told DailySocial that when asked the question about BlackBerry during the TV interview, he wasn’t entirely prepared, hence the “next year” response. Emmalee Kremer from The Hatch Agency, who claims to represent Path, contacted DailySocial regarding this comment and said that “seems that there was a misunderstanding as there are no plans to develop for BlackBerry at this time”. The agency apparently had also contacted many other news sites regarding this item and given the same or similar statement.
At this point, which is around 2 in the morning on Saturday, we have to admit, our memory is a bit fuzzy to recall what exactly was said 18 or so hours ago, so we’re looking to see if anyone has a recording of Dave Morin’s interview on TV One’s Apa Kabar Indonesia on Friday 1 November, preferably on YouTube, because it doesn’t seem to have surfaced on TV One’s website just yet.
In any case, Morin told us that going to BlackBerry is something that he thought about and seeing how popular it is in Indonesia and how popular Path is here, it might make sense, but the company has yet to commit to anything in that regard at this point. In the past, Morin has said that he’s only interested in native app development, so even though porting Path’s Android app to BlackBerry 10 is possible, it’s never going to happen. If Path were to make an app for BlackBerry, it would be native.
Additionally, there’s no guarantee that BlackBerry will still be selling devices or maintaining an operating system one way or another by the end of 2014 given its sales performance to date, so any mention of developing for BlackBerry at this point would come as a surprise for a lot of people. And it was.