The Terminal Decline of BlackBerry

In the fourth quarter of 2016, BlackBerry has hit another milestone in its steady decline from “Crackberry” (so addictive was the use of its phones) to a place in the gallery of failed phone manufacturers. According to Gartner, BlackBerry sold just 207,900 devices running its own operating system between October and December, putting the company’s market share at 0.0 percent (or 0.048 percent to be exact).

Prior to the iPhone’s launch in 2007 and the subsequent surge in smartphone sales around the world, BlackBerry phones were immensely popular for their secure messaging and email functionality, especially among professional users. The company never quite managed the transition to smartphones successfully though, and after several strategic shifts announced in September that it would no longer make its own phones.

That won’t be the end of BlackBerry phones though, as the company reiterated in a blog post published in December. The company is merely shifting all of its efforts to software and plans to work with third-party phone manufacturers such as Chinese brand TCL Communication in keeping the BlackBerry brand alive.