BlackBerry, as we know it, is officially dead.
The once ubiquitous phone manufacturer is now a distant memory as the company’s mobile market share hit zero percent this quarter. More than 431 million smartphones were sold during the fourth quarter of 2016, according to a report by Gartner. Of those, only 207,900 run on BlackBerry’s operating system, giving the company just 0.0482 percent of the overall share.
At its height, BlackBerry, or CrackBerry, was the smartphone of choice for professionals and officials, who chose it for its svelte looks and handy keyboard. It was just earlier this decade when the high-end phone manufacturer was competing with Nokia for the top spot for OS market share.
But both companies fell victim to a surprising disruption in the market when Apple released its first iPhone back in 2007. It took just three years for iOS to catch up to Blackberry’s RIM operating system, which held less than 1 percent market share by the end of 2013.
Statista
Last September, BlackBerry announced it would stop making mobile devices and focus on the software side of things.
“The smartphone of the future is about the smart, not about the phone,” John Chen, CEO of BlackBerry, told Bloomberg. “If people focus on the physical phone itself they might be missing the whole equation. You know, they [phones] are smart about application, smart about AI, smart about personalization, decision making – it’s really about that. We are doubling down on those. It’s the start of a new chapter, not the end of an era.”
BlackBerry did release the Android-powered Priv last year, but only sold around 400,000 devices.
There is a small chance we’ll see BlackBerry release new devices under its own OS. The company insists the BlackBerry 10 operating system it released in 2013 still isn’t dead.
H/T Business Insider