BlackBerry, company once dominated smart mobile devices, recently announced that it has finally stopped providing its main phone-powered services. As of today, phones will no longer have provisioning services, which means they will gradually lose the ability to join networks, including mobile networks.
It seems hard to imagine if you weren’t using a cell phone at that time, but BlackBerry once dominated the smartphone market. Its keyboard-based hardware has gained widespread acceptance in corporate premises, in part because the services it provides often run through BlackBerry servers, allowing for a high degree of control and security. An indication of its importance are the early internal builds of Android looks like a cheap BlackBerry clone, rather than a cheap iPhone clone that has finally been released.
Unlike the Android developers, BlackBerry’s leadership is obscured by popularity of iPhone. BlackBerry has ditched the virtual keyboard and relied on its hold on the company’s services to gain market share. The company took more than a year after releasing the iPhone to come up with own touch screen phone, and its software remained an awkward mix of old and new for a while after that. Meanwhile, business users love their Apple and Android phones and force IT departments to support them.
BlackBerry eventually gave up on its phones and started releasing versions of Android before exiting the hardware business entirely (it now mainly provides corporate security services). The last version of the BlackBerry operating system was released in 2013, so the affected devices here are very old now. The promised support period actually ended over a year ago, meaning the company has over-delivered on its promises.
The effects of ending support are detailed above a FAQ page that the old device manufacturer is storing. The important change is that BlackBerry will no longer send licensing updates to these devices. Licensing information provides details about how a device establishes connections with different types of network devices, including cellular and Wi-Fi networks. At some unspecified point in the future, network updates made by your carrier will mean that BlackBerry devices will no longer be able to connect. As a result, BlackBerry says its devices “will no longer operate reliably, including data, phone calls, SMS, and 9-1-1 functionality.”
There are some software services that rely on a connection to a BlackBerry server to function. So if you rely on something like BlackBerry World or BlackBerry Link, those will stop working today.
The number of people potentially affected by this is very small. However, it still serves as a clear sign of the end of what was once a very important technology.
This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.
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