WhatsApp for BlackBerry

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

~ the obit ~

blackberry was a particular kind of phone, the qwerty thumb-keyboard email-first device that ran on a specific kind of work-life arrangement i did not have. in turkey blackberry was a corporate-issued tool for executives or a status purchase for brand-conscious users, the actual phone i had through that window was a nokia and then a samsung galaxy running android. so this story is the whatsapp side i did know, the blackberry side i did not.

this is mostly told from the cross-platform side. the facts hold up clean. anyway, whatsapp launched on iphone in '09, jan koum and brian acton built the first version while still at yahoo. roughly. through 2010 the company shipped native clients for the platforms that owned the rest of the global phone market, bbos around 2010, symbian and android in 2010, nokia s40 a bit later. blackberry was a real share of the global phone market into '13 or so, especially in indonesia and across the gulf states, the blackberry client was a serious product.

either way, the cross-platform shape was the whole pitch. close enough. whatsapp worked equally well on every phone, that was the reason a blackberry user and an iphone user could keep talking. the network effect did not require everyone to be on ios, the app was the cross-platform-bbm-replacement-everywhere-else, the messenger that decoupled the chat network from the phone brand. honestly, for about five years that was the bigger product than the iphone-side experience by itself.

this happened more in the indonesian and indian and gulf and african markets than where i was, the bbos client was disproportionately important outside the us and western europe. through 2012 to 2015 entire countries ran their personal messaging on whatsapp for blackberry, the brand owned the prepaid-mobile market in big chunks of the global south. the blackberry client was a critical product for the user base, not a side build.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the cracks ~

on 26 february '16 whatsapp posted a blog announcement that support for bbos and blackberry 10 plus a list of older symbian and android builds would end by the end of '16. close enough. the post framed it as a security and platform-capability decision, the older operating systems could not support the encryption and the media features whatsapp wanted to ship next.

to be honest, the deadline slipped. the initial cutoff moved from 31 december '16 to 30 june '17, then for bbos and bb10 it moved again to 31 december '17. the staggered cutoff window let users get through the migration, the practical effect was that the platform was on a known countdown for about two years before the lights went off.

~ what really happened ~

this part i watched from the android side. on 31 december '17 the bbos and bb10 whatsapp clients stopped registering new accounts, lost message send and receive on the existing accounts, became permanent error screens. the user base had been migrating to android-running blackberry handsets through 2017 already, the new keyone and the new motion were both android phones that ran whatsapp for android natively. roughly.

the symbian s60 client died on 30 june '17 in the first cutoff. the nokia s40 client lasted until 31 december '18, the windows phone build held on a year longer. each cutoff closed a chunk of the pre-smartphone-monoculture phone market, the period when the messenger had to run on every os under the sun.

~ what got buried ~

the artifact is the cross-platform-messenger-anywhere shape itself. whatsapp on bbos was the proof point that a single chat network could span every phone shape on earth at once, the platform was deliberately polyglot in a way that messengers since stopped being. by 2020 ios and android were the only platforms whatsapp cared about. the multi-platform era was closed.

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