BlackBerry 10's spiritual successor could be coming to your Android phone

Hadlee Simons / Android Authority

BlackBerry 10 may have been a failed rival to Android and iOS, but it was an intriguing and innovative mobile platform in its own right. Now, an enterprising developer has decided to build a spiritual successor to BlackBerry 10, and it’ll run on Android phones.

Developer Patrick Quinn has announced development of the Marathon OS project, which he claims will be a spiritual successor to BlackBerry 10. Quinn says the platform will include BB10 staples such as the familiar gesture navigation system, a take on the BlackBerry Hub for a unified messaging/notification inbox, and the Active Frames concept. When it comes to the latter, BlackBerry 10 had a home screen that showed currently running apps as card-based windows, and these windows were still able to refresh in real-time. Marathon OS even features the BB10 peek gesture, which allows you to view notifications with a short swipe up.

What’s particularly interesting is that this isn’t actually an Android ROM, as it’s based on the Linux-based postmarketOS project. Quinn states that Marathon OS only supports Linux apps, Electron apps, and so-called Marathon apps right now. However, the developer promises that Android app support will be available soon via a forked version of the Waydroid utility for running Android apps in a container.

The encouraging news is that the platform is supposedly up and running on the OnePlus 6 at 60fps, with plans to bring Marathon OS to the OnePlus 6T, POCO F1, existing postmarketOS devices, and more. The developer hopes to deliver “fluid” performance on decade-old chips and “exceptional” performance on modern hardware. Quinn is also planning to enable community ports, so users can bring Marathon OS to devices of their choosing. In a neat touch, Quinn says he’s working with the Zinwa team to potentially bring this platform to the resurrected BlackBerry Classic.

It’s clear that this isn’t an exact copy of BlackBerry 10. However, the developer confirmed that while this is inspired by the older platform, it was their “own vision.” That’s not a bad thing as BlackBerry 10 was great from a functional perspective, but not the most aesthetically pleasing mobile platform on the market.

It’s also worth noting that BlackBerry still offers the BlackBerry Hub as a subscription or ad-based affair on the Play Store, so you can give that a try if you miss that particular BlackBerry feature. Now, about the company updating the venerable BlackBerry Keyboard app to run on recent versions of Android.