>Patent licensing fees were a big part of the equation, which led to inability to lower costs to compete.

Yes. OP asserted that too. Like OP, you haven't actually given a reason why. Here's some counter-arguments:

1) BB grew exponentially all the while paying Qualcomm licensing fees - why didn't it affect them then?

2) EVERYONE was paying the same licensing fees to Qualcomm. You couldn't build a smartphone connected to the cellular network and not pay those fees. So are you saying that it affected BB more than it affected Apple, Palm, MS, Samsung, etc. ?

BB phones, <= v7, are split between an internal gear without Qualcomm, and the CDMA capable stuff is with Qualcomm. So they would have to pay Qualcomm even for the phone with internal gear.

As to #1, around BBOS v5 and v6, when they were pretty much top dog, all the cellphone accounts that wants to use a BB pays a service-access fee, or a BlackBerry Tax that goes to the company. Enterprise companies that want their emails and everything else also pays for the BlackBerry Enterprise Server. They were practically the only game in town.

They didn't have problem then, because they were rolling in cash; just like how they didn't have a problem basically buying up Philips st expanding, or keep coming up with phone models even though there's no way that there's enough demand to actually absorb the production.

#2 on top of needing to deal with Qualcomm licensing fees, which often applied (as the article stated) on non-qualcomm phones, they basically freaked out after losing that lawsuit to the patent troll, so they end up overpaying for licenses (not sure who's the licenser in this case) to avoid getting hit with more patent trolls. The contracts for those licenses were quite hard to get out of. By the time they were making the BlackBerry Priv, they don't have the SAF to juice their income. Patent licensing, Qualcomm and others, were disproportionally high, compared to other Android providers. They can't renegotiate some of them due to the contract wording. Being 1% of the market means Qualcomm hardly cared to give support, because Qualcomm is far more likely to help Samsung and other android phone, that pushed out far more numbers than BlackBerry did at the end.

It ends up being that they end up licensing their brand, because had they manufactured their own phone, they'd have to deal with the patent licensing contracts that they can't get out from.

There's probably a reason why OP won't be too forthright in describing why. I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader.

To add, the SAF is not just a pure BlackBerry tax. Without getting too deep into it, there's stuff that needs to be set up with the carrier, and that's why BlackBerry push was a true push back in the day, without the phone burning through both battery and data. And when this gear malfunctions, you'd know, because you're not getting push at all.

They sipped battery and data, and once that gear is setup, the SAF was very profitable.

Even to this day, email is not the same level of instant.