Another piece of BlackBerry history is being brought back, as someone is trying to build a successor to BlackBerry 10 that will run on Android phones.
The developer behind the project, Patrick Quinn, revealed Marathon OS on its website, claiming it will be a spiritual successor to the ‘BB10’ OS. Quinn says the OS will include staples from the widely-popular BlackBerry OS, such as the familiar gesture navigation system, a take on the BlackBerry hub to unify the messaging/notifications, and the Active Frames concept, which showed currently running apps as small windows, and were still able to refresh in real time properly. The Marathon OS even has BB10’s ‘peek’ gesture, which lets you view notifications with a quick swipe up.
The OS runs on Linux and is based on the PostmarketOS project. Because of this, Quinn states that Marathon OS only supports Linux apps, Electron apps, and what is referred to as Marathon apps. However, there is a promise to bring Android app support to Marathon OS using a forked version of the Waydroid utility.
In terms of running the OS on actual hardware, there is good news: the device is reportedly running on a OnePlus 6 at about 60 FPS. According to Android Authority, the device is coming to more devices, including the OnePlus 6T, the POCO F1, and existing PostmarketOS devices. Android Authority also mentioned that Quinn is planning to enable community ports, allowing users to bring MarathonOS to any device of their choosing. Let’s see how long it takes for the internet to port this onto random devices with a touchscreen.
Source: Android Authority
Image Credit – Shutterstock
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