> In order to operate in some countries, all Blackberry traffic had to be routed through that country's government servers.

> It's been a long while, but I'm pretty sure that India was one such country. And at least one Middle Eastern country.

This was only related to the BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), and even then only on the standard consumer phones. The corporate servers had their own keys, IIRC. Plus, it was only for messages traversing Indian or Pakistani networks, and my memory was that BlackBerry did not hand the keys over, just answered all of their requests.

Even at that, this level of encrypted communications was not otherwise widely available for consumers. The actual migration from BBM to whatever iPhone and Android were offering were downgrades.

I'm not aware that BlackBerry devices were ever rooted, and they were default encrypted with 128-bit AES. The OS required users to grant permission for apps to access resources, such as GPS. This took something close to a decade to be installed and enabled by default in iOS and Android.

There was a big story where 3rd-party apps installed by providers contained malware. It was a huge story run everywhere and headlines made it sound as if every single phone had this vulnerability. However, they didn't mention the vulnerability could not affect BlackBerry devices because BlackBerry had a contract with all providers that the provider could not install any software to the device.

Not security-related, but a big complaint from devs at the time was that BlackBerry had so many different devices that it was very expensive to develop for. Apple, for sure, and maybe Android promised this would never happen on their platforms. Only the truly naive could believe this.

My takeaway was that BlackBerry somehow pissed-off all of the tech journos and suffered appropriately. That's why they got nothing but bad press.

The other thing they suffered from was this "co-CEO" nonsense. For whatever reason, it seems nearly universal that if more than one person is in charge, nobody is accountable.

Edit:

And something even I forget about is that prior to the Snowden releases, concerns over government snooping were only for the tin-foil hat donned black-helicopter dodging conspiracy theorists. It just wasn't on the public's radar.