Facebook is dropping support for BlackBerry’s mobile operating systems, which will force BlackBerry owners to use the social network’s mobile website if they’d like to access it on the go. Lou Gazzola, BlackBerry’s senior marketing manager for developer relations, announced the news today in a blog post. Just last month, Facebook-owned WhatsApp announced it would discontinue its Blackberry 10 and BBOS apps by the end of the year.
“We are extremely disappointed in their decision, as we know so many users love these apps. We fought back to work with WhatsApp and Facebook to change their minds, but at this time, their decision stands,” wrote Gazzola. “Despite this, we have worked hard to ensure that our end-users have the best experience in light of this decision, and we are continuing to search for alternate solutions.”
Gazzola says Facebook is cutting off support for its “essential APIs,” meaning BlackBerry’s third-party apps will cease functioning. It’s unclear at what point Facebook plans to do this, or if the process has already begun; both BlackBerry-made Facebook apps are still available in the BlackBerry World app store.
Of course, BlackBerry has placed the future of its struggling mobile business on the Priv, an Android-powered handset with a sliding keyboard that came out last year. So it’s not a huge surprise that companies, even those with billions of users, would eventually stop supporting operating systems as sparsely used as BlackBerry’s.
