Less than a month ago, WhatsApp announced that it will no longer be supporting the not so popular mobile platforms including BlackBerry. This news did not go well with BlackBerry and its fans as it was seen as a malicious move considering that there are still many people using the platform out there.
Read More: WhatsApp to Stop Supporting Blackberry Devices with New Updates by The End of This Year
Well, it looks like BlackBerry fans should be worried even more as WhatsApp is not the only app that will be leaving the platform. Facebook is also apparently planning to leave the platform this year. It is reported that Facebook and Messenger applications will not work on BlackBerry OS including BlackBerry 10 devices as from the end of this year.
This was revealed by BlackBerry through its official blog saying, “Facebook made the decision to discontinue support of their essential APIs for BlackBerry and WhatsApp announced they would end support for BlackBerry 10 and BBOS at the end of 2016.”
You probably already know that Facebook owns WhatsApp and the announcement that WhatsApp was to leave BlackBerry sort of paved the way for this latest announcement. This is a big blow for BlackBerry as Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp are some of the top social networking and Instant messaging applications out there. These apps have over 1 billion downloads each on Google’s play store and this shows that they are very popular.
If BlackBerry is not able to attract big name apps such as Facebook, how will it be able to attract the small ones? This is really bad for the platform and the move by Facebook and WhatsApp may encourage other developers to leave the platform too. Of course BlackBerry doesn’t want this but if it happens, they will not be able to do anything about it. BlackBerry device sales have been on the decline the last couple of years and even as the company tried to reinvent itself through BlackBerry 10, nothing concrete came out of that. Competition on the market is very stiff and it looks like BlackBerry is losing.
Even as this happens, BlackBerry is still committed on its platform and has promised to always support it on the foreseeable future.
Read More: BlackBerry is Looking for Alternatives as WhatsApp Plans to End Support for Blackberry 10 This Year