People will finally have to let their precious BlackBerry products go in 2022. The company has reminded its users that it's dropping support for its legacy software—including its eponymous operating system—early next year.
"As a reminder, the legacy services for BlackBerry 7.1 OS and earlier, BlackBerry 10 software, BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.1 and earlier versions, will no longer be available after January 4, 2022," the company says in a support article. "As of this date, devices running these legacy services and software through either carrier or Wi-Fi connections will no longer reliably function, including for data, phone calls, SMS and 9-1-1 functionality."
BlackBerry says that its Enhanced Sim Based Licensing (ESBL) / Identity Based Licensing (IBL), BlackBerry Link, BlackBerry Desktop Manager, BlackBerry Blend, and BlackBerry hosted email addresses will also be affected by "the termination of these service offerings and infrastructure." A legacy version of BlackBerry Protect will be shut down as well, but a new service with the same name will continue to operate. (Which shouldn't be confusing at all.)
It was only a matter of time until BlackBerry shut down these services. The company stopped manufacturing its own phones in 2016, shut down the popular BlackBerry Messenger in 2019, and a new BlackBerry-branded smartphones that OnwardMobility said it would start to ship in the first half of 2021 has yet to debut. It's more surprising that BlackBerry continued to support this legacy software even as it refocused on security products.
BlackBerry says that its Android phones "will not be impacted by the EOL of infrastructure services unless they are receiving redirected email sent to a BlackBerry hosted email address, or assigned an Enhanced Sim Based License (ESBL) or Identity Based License (IBL)." (Emphasis theirs.) The company also notes that BBM Enterprise, its messaging and conferencing service for desktop and mobile devices, will continue to function on other platforms.