BlackBerry World

» see appworld.blackberry.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

the blackberry crowd in turkey was a thin slice of corporate users and a brief consumer wave around 2010 to 2013 when turkcell pushed bbm as a free messaging product. i was not in that crowd. i had moved to android by the time blackberry app world launched in april 2009, and by the bb10 rebrand in january 2013 the bb fleet around me was already shrinking back to a few stubborn business users. blackberry world was the store for an audience that had mostly already left.

the store launched on april 1 2009 as blackberry app world, alongside a much-quieter pre-bb10 era of small enterprise utilities and lockscreen tweaks. the catalog grew slowly for the first few years compared to apple and android. the real expansion came with bb10 and the q10 and z10 hardware in early 2013, when rim rebranded the store to blackberry world and pushed a developer recruitment drive. by march 2013 the catalog crossed about a hundred and thirty-five thousand apps, with rim reporting around four billion cumulative downloads and six million daily downloads at that point.

anyway, the bb10 launch was the last real product moment for the platform. by mid 2015 blackberry shipped the priv, an android phone with a slide-out physical keyboard, and the strategic shift was explicit: new blackberry hardware would run android and use google play, not blackberry world. blackberry licensed the brand to tcl in december 2016 for android phones, the rim-built device pipeline ended. blackberry world the storefront kept running for the existing bb10 and bbos installed base until december 31 2019, when new app downloads were closed off.

the residual login and core services for the legacy classic blackberry devices were retired on january 4 2022, which is the date the bbm-on-bb10 and a few other pieces actually stopped working. the storefront sunset of late 2019 was the cultural endpoint, the 2022 cut was administrative cleanup for the remaining diehards still carrying a passport or a q10 as a daily driver.

~ the dossier ~

~ the bb10 push ~

bb10 was the rewrite that was supposed to save the platform. the os shipped on the z10 in january 2013 and the q10 in april 2013, with a card-stack multitasking model that owed visible debt to webos and a gesture-driven home interaction. blackberry world the store launched in parallel with a developer-incentive program that paid bonuses to publishers who ported successful android and ios apps to the bb10 runtime. the bb10 java runtime included an android compatibility layer that let many android apks run with minimal modification, which inflated the catalog count quickly but also meant a lot of the store's apps were second-class ports.

the strategic problem was that the audience for the platform was a shrinking enterprise base, the consumer audience that had carried bbm through the 2009-2012 wave had mostly moved to whatsapp by 2013. honestly, the developer-bonus program got the catalog up but the daily download numbers tell the real story: about six million daily downloads in march 2013, on an installed base that was already smaller than apple or android by an order of magnitude.

~ what got buried with it ~

the storefront's sunset closed off a small cluster of apps that had no equivalent on ios or android because they were built around blackberry-specific hardware affordances: the physical keyboard, the trackpad, the dedicated send key, the convenience key. the lock-screen widgets and the active frames feature on bb10 were paradigms a few developers had built apps around, and those apps did not port cleanly anywhere else. when blackberry world closed those products were stranded with no migration path.

the legacy bbm-on-bb10 messaging continued to work through the storefront sunset window because bbm was a separate service from the store, but the consumer bbm shutdown had already happened in may 2019, leaving only enterprise bbm. by january 4 2022 the classic services cutoff turned every remaining bb10 and bbos device into a phone without push email, without bbm, without secure server connectivity. the priv and the tcl-built keyone and key2 ran android and survived the 2022 cut because they had nothing to do with blackberry world's legacy stack.

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