Facebook has announced that they will stop running on all Blackberry phones.

Facebook has announced that they will stop running
on all Blackberry phones.

This is a huge blow to Blackberry whose customer
base has declined immensely over the past few
years.
The decision by Facebook, which last year passed
the milestone of 1 billion people using its service in
one day
, follows on the heels of a similar move from
WhatsApp, which announced last month that it
would pull BlackBerry support for its messaging app
by the end of 2016.
After heady days as the phone of choice for the
likes of Hillary Clinton, BlackBerry has faced a
decline in recent years.
While Android and Apple account for 58 percent
and 39 percent of smartphone sales in the US
(based on recent figures from Kantar Worldpanel)
BlackBerry falls under the unfortunate “other”
category, which accounts for 0.1 percent of sales.
Facebook however said it will give BlackBerry users
an app that will link them to Facebook through the
web.
Speaking on the development, BlackBerry said that
it was “extremely disappointed” in Facebook’s
decision, saying, “We fought back to work with
WhatsApp and Facebook to change their minds, but
at this time, their decision stands.
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.”
Users hoping to get by on third-party apps are also
likely to be out of luck, with BlackBerry noting that
Facebook had opted to “discontinue support of
their essential APIs.” These APIs are the very thing
that developers build on when they create their
own third-party apps.
Apps for Facebook and WhatsApp make up five of
the top 10 free apps on the BlackBerry World app
store, three of which are made by BlackBerry or
third party developers. But in a sign of what the
future of apps could look like on the platform, the
two BlackBerry-made Facebook apps are now
nothing more than links to Facebook’s mobile
website.