BlackBerry OS is Now Officially Discontinued; Here’s What The Company is Doing Now

By
Shawn Ambrose
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If you walk up to a kid and ask them if they’ve ever used a BlackBerry, they’d probably furrow their brows in confusion and wonder if your mental faculties had begun to fail.

“I’ve never used it, but I’ve certainly eaten it before…weirdo,” they’d reply. 

But long before Apple became the most popular fruit in the phone industry, BlackBerry was king, and used by all the cool and wealthy people, including Barack Obama.

It may be hard to believe now, but thanks to its instant messaging service and push email, BlackBerry’s device was once seen as the phone of the future.

But then Apple came in like a wrecking ball, and knocked it off the face of the earth within a few years.

Now, the company is officially giving up.

BlackBerry OS is Now Officially Discontinued

Services for older Blackberry devices were officially discontinued yesterday (4 Jan), and will “no longer reliably function”, the company announced.

That’s right, BlackBerry is pulling the plug on its phones.

This means that users, presumably people who time-travelled from 2009, will be unable to get data, texts or make phone calls, including to emergency numbers.

Once Controlled 50% of Market

At one point, believe it or not, BlackBerry controlled 50% of the smartphone market in the US, and 20% globally.

At its peak in 2011, it sold over 50 million phones.

People loved the BlackBerry phone for a few reasons:

  1. It had a sleek design
  2. It had a full keyboard, making it easy for business professionals to work outside the office
  3. It had an instant messaging service that allowed all users to stay connected all the time

So, why did it fail? Six words: Apple.

Reader: That’s one word. 

Thanks to the emergence of Apple’s futuristic, keyboardless, and touchscreen iPhones, along with all the similar Android iterations that followed, BlackBerry simply became obsolete.

And because it failed to innovate, it was left too far behind to catch up.

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What is the Company Doing Now?

In 2016, BlackBerry announced that it would stop manufacturing phones and transition into making software focused on security.

In fact, when you google the company now, it says that it’s a “software company specializing in cybersecurity.”

“BlackBerry provides enterprises and governments with the software and services they need to secure the Internet of Things,” it said on its website.

Instead of phones, it details its security software features on its homepage, such as “critical event management” and other things we don’t understand.

Soon after the announcement, tributes poured in on Twitter, with many users calling it the “end of an era.”

Meanwhile, Nokia is still surviving. How exactly? We don’t know.

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Shawn Ambrose
Email: [email protected]