Blackberry has in recent times been opening up its core applications to all users. The first of such decisions was made in 2013, when the company made available its Blackberry Messenger App (BBM) available to Android and iOS users. Just last week, the firm announced that the Blackberry Hub, a centralized messaging tool was to soon be available to all android users for a fee of $1 a month or with the option to use it with ads.
Blackberry has today announced that it will no longer support one its productivity apps, Blend. This decision is a break from the recent trend of opening up its services. Blend is a secure application that allows the user to interact with their BlackBerry smartphone, including the email client, calendar, BlackBerry Hub, text messages and others all from a separate application on your computer or even tablet (think of a super cool and secure version of PushBullet). You can opt to reply to these messages from within the Blackberry Blend app. The news was made on Blackberry’s software support lifecycle page which hints that support ceased on 31st July 2016.
This is of course a huge disappointment to fans of the service like myself, and I thought Blend was likely the next App to make a crossover to Android and other OSs in addition to the Blackberry keyboard. Termination of support for most Blackberry seems to have taken center stage in recent months. Facebook made the first announcement to this regard in March 2016, stating that support for the Facebook app on BlackBerry 10 and BlackBerry OS versions 7.1 was to stop immediately. WhatsApp also made the announcement stating that support for Old versions of BlackBerry OS, Android and Windows Phone will no longer be supported come 2017. This is certainly an interesting decision by Blackberry.
