Facebook has dealt a major blow to the already struggling BlackBerry. The social media giant recently decided to discontinue support of their APIs for BlackBerry (for Facebook and WhatsApp). They will end support for BlackBerry 10 and BBOS at the end of the year.
BlackBerry’s Lou Igazzola expressed his disappointment in a blog post (via AdWeek), and encouraged users to protest to Facebook. He wrote:
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 (but let them know how you feel on social media, using the hashtag #ILoveBB10Apps). Despite this, we have worked hard to ensure our end users have the best experience in light of this decision, and are continuing to search for alternate solutions.
Our commitment to BlackBerry 10 and to developers has not changed – we know our developer community continues to be one of the strongest proponents of BlackBerry 10 and they are creating thousands of apps every month. As a way to support them and to promote new apps, we’re now featuring some of the best native applications on BlackBerry World in a list called “Great Apps on BlackBerry.” The category will be a list of 20 applications, featured for two weeks, once per month, similar to the way we feature apps on the BlackBerry World Carousel. We’re also continuing whenever we can to invest in apps important to users, such as the update to the Twitter app released today with important fixes and another update coming in a month with new features. This ensures that our many BlackBerry 10 customers have the best OS and apps possible.
Losing support for WhatsApp is one thing, but not having support for Facebook is a huge problem for a device maker to have at this point.
At last count, Facebook has 1.04 billion daily active users. It has 934 million mobile daily active users. It has 1.44 mobile monthly active users.
Image via Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)