Posters are cropping all over Facebook HQ, imploring the employees to switch from iPhones to Android based phones. The social media company doesn’t share a particular bias for the green droid, but feels that the only way to speed up the development process for a bug-free Android app would be if the employees switch to Android.
However, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen companies make a switch with respect to their mobile platform. Recently, The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board has cemented its resolve to replace RIM’s BlackBerry devices in favour of the iPhone. RIM’s services failed twice over the year, causing the services of the NTSB to get severely impacted during crisis situations. This sort of an outage could be catastrophic, given how the NTSB looks after the investigations for aviation and other transport based accidents. So with BB services going out, the coordination of the investigation could get affected, which led to the NTSB switching to the iPhone.
This is sad news given that BlackBerry had just launched BlackBerry Mobile Fusion, a multi-platform device management suite. Through Fusion, BB had hoped to at least consolidate its enterprise business, allowing the people to use just a single tool to manage iOS, Android and BlackBerry devices all in one go.
BlackBerry is the leading example of changing times, of how even big names can lose out to competition. While Facebook’s push for Android adoption may seem like the company’s trying to promote the OS, but the reality remains that its only trying to push its developers to get used to an OS for which they are having a hard time developing a well fleshed out app.