Facebook ditches support for BlackBerry
With 1.44 billion mobile monthly active users as of Dec. 2015, Facebook is the most popular mobile app in the world.
Unfortunately for BlackBerry users, they won't be a part of this statistic come year-end, as Facebook will stop supporting the BlackBerry and BBOS platforms at the end of 2016.
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The news comes less than a month after Facebook-owned messaging app WhatsApp announced it will stop supporting BlackBerry devices by the end of the year.
BlackBerry App Ecosystem lead Lou Gazzola announced the change in a blog post last week, saying Facebook would discontinue support of their essential APIs for BlackBerry.
"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," he wrote.
"We are extremely disappointed in their [Facebook's] decision as we know so many users love these apps."
Even though Gazzola bundled WhatsApp and Facebook together, Facebook dropping support is a a much bigger hit for BlackBerry's operating system, BlackBerry 10 (the older BlackBerry OS is still live on some devices, and Facebook has ended support for it as well).
BlackBerry users won't be entirely Facebook-less, even without official support. A recent support note on BlackBerry's website recommends users to move to the web-based version of Facebook, saying it will provide "the most feature rich alternative."
This might be a final wake-up call for BlackBerry. The company released its first Android-based smartphone, the BlackBerry Priv, in Nov. 2015 to good reviews.
In the meantime, BlackBerry's mobile platform keeps losing market share, to the point that it's only the tiniest of blips on the mobile platform radar. According to a Nielsen study, only 0.7% of Americans used a phone running BlackBerry's platform in the third quarter of 2015.
And while the end of 2016 is still a ways off, it's hard to justify buying a phone that nearly no one else uses, and that won't support some of the most popular apps out there in a matter of months.
Perhaps it's time for BlackBerry to focus all its efforts on Android.
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Stan is a Senior Editor at Mashable, where he has worked since 2007. He's got more battery-powered gadgets and band t-shirts than you. He writes about the next groundbreaking thing. Typically, this is a phone, a coin, or a car. His ultimate goal is to know something about everything.
