BlackBerry is finally shutting down—and this time it is for real! The BlackBerry phone was once the undisputable king of mobile—now, it is finally shutting down on January 4th. All classic devices running BlackBerry OS 7.1 or earlier, as well as OS 10, will lose key services from next Tuesday.
From next Tuesday, all basic capabilities of the once popular phone will stop functioning. These include phone calls, texting, data, and emergency 9-1-1 access. There is a high possibility that you could be denied access to Wi-Fi and apps like BlackBerry World and Desktop manager, reports Liliputing.
Despite losing its market share to the iPhone, the company tried to win back its place by adopting the Android OS; which of course was a failure. Its attempt to match the iPhone with the Adoption of the Android OS failed largely because it was already too late.
in 2019, BlackBerry killed its popular messaging app BBM. Emtek, the Indonesian company that bought over the app in 2008 said it had struggled to sustain its user base, while adding new one remained a difficult task. The popularity and growth of major messaging apps like WhatsApp, Messenger, and the likes did not help—users migrated and things never got any better for BBM.
BBM soon clocked 100 million installs on the Google Play Store almost two years after it was launched. While that seemed a massive achievement for BlackBerry, the company had even more reason to be happy at the time as it announced that stickers were sent more than a billion times by users all over the world.
The BlackBerry Messenger app gradually became less-appealing to users as WhatsApp and the likes gained more prominence in the market. It was quite a successful messaging app in those days and a lot of users enjoyed it especially in terms of keeping in touch with loved ones. Perhaps, its success was what encouraged BlackBerry to make it an all-platform app—extending it to Android, iOS and Windows platform.
Things started going contrary to plans as BlackBerry in June 2015 pulled the BBM app from the Windows Phone Store, and users were no longer able to install it on Windows phones; the Android and iOS clients, however, remained accessible. This coincided with WhatsApp announcement that it had hit 100 million calls on its platform in the same year. Apparently, this further affected the BBM app.
