Before the iPhone. Before Android dominated practically every pocket on the planet. Before WhatsApp groups, FaceTime, TikTok and endlessly scrolling through social media…
There was BlackBerry.
And for a while, owning one meant you were either a high-powered business executive, a celebrity, a politician… or someone furiously swapping BBM PINs on a Friday night.
That little flashing notification light could command your attention from across the room.
The physical keyboard was ridiculously satisfying.
And BBM was basically WhatsApp before WhatsApp took over the world.
At its height, BlackBerry was one of the biggest names in mobile technology, with tens of millions of subscribers and a reputation for security that made its devices particularly attractive to businesses and governments.
Then Apple and Android changed the rules.
BlackBerry went from smartphone royalty to an almost complete disappearance from the handset market.
So grab your Curve, check that flashing red light and prepare for a serious blast of tech nostalgia.
This is the rise and fall of BlackBerry.
🖥️ Before BlackBerry Was BlackBerry
The story actually begins long before everyone started asking:
“What’s your BBM PIN?”
Research In Motion — better known as RIM — was founded in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, in 1984 by Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin.
The company originally concentrated on wireless communications technology rather than building conventional mobile phones.
During the 1990s, mobile communication was a completely different world.
Internet-connected phones weren’t normal.
Mobile data was limited.
Text messaging was still developing.
And receiving your emails while walking around town sounded considerably more futuristic than it does today.
RIM saw an opportunity.
Instead of simply building another telephone, it concentrated on moving small amounts of information efficiently over wireless networks.
That eventually helped create the technology that would make BlackBerry famous.
📟 The Pager That Started Something Huge
One of RIM’s early breakthroughs came with its two-way wireless pagers.
Then, in 1999, the BlackBerry name arrived.
Early BlackBerry devices weren’t really smartphones in the modern sense. They were communication machines designed around one killer feature:
Mobile email.
And that was massive.
Today, getting an email on your phone is about as exciting as finding another supermarket loyalty notification.
Back then?
Being able to receive and reply to work emails while away from your desk was revolutionary.
Businesses loved it.
Executives loved it.
Governments loved it.
IT departments especially loved BlackBerry because the company built a formidable reputation around security, encryption and centralised device management.
The smartphone revolution was beginning — and BlackBerry was right at the front.
⌨️ That Keyboard
Then there was the keyboard.
Oh yes.
That glorious little QWERTY keyboard.
BlackBerry’s physical keyboards became one of the most recognisable designs in mobile phone history.
Users could hammer out emails and messages astonishingly quickly, and once you’d mastered typing with your thumbs, touchscreen keyboards could initially feel strangely slow.
Models such as the BlackBerry Curve, Pearl and Bold helped move the brand beyond the boardroom.
BlackBerry wasn’t merely a corporate device anymore.
It became cool.
🔴 The Flashing Red Light
If you owned one, you’ll remember it.
Sitting across the room…
FLASH.
You’d spotted it.
The BlackBerry notification LED.
You didn’t know whether it was an important email, a BBM message or something completely pointless.
Didn’t matter.
You were checking it.
BlackBerry devices became so addictive that the nickname “CrackBerry” entered popular culture.
And then came the feature that transformed BlackBerry from a business tool into a social phenomenon.
💬 BBM Changed Everything
BlackBerry Messenger — BBM — was years ahead of its time.
Instead of relying solely on SMS messages, BlackBerry users could communicate through an internet-based instant messaging service.
There were delivery indicators.
Read indicators.
Group chats.
Profile pictures.
Status updates.
Voice notes.
And, of course…
BBM PINs.
Forget asking someone for their telephone number.
There was a period when:
“What’s your PIN?”
was practically a social ritual.
BBM helped turn BlackBerry into a youth phenomenon, particularly in markets including Britain.
Years before WhatsApp became practically unavoidable, BlackBerry had already demonstrated how powerful mobile internet messaging could become.
👑 BlackBerry Takes Over the World
By the late 2000s and beginning of the 2010s, BlackBerry was enormous.
The company had successfully crossed the gap between corporate technology and mainstream consumer electronics.
Research into BlackBerry’s history shows just how spectacular that growth was.
By the end of 2007, RIM’s market capitalisation had climbed beyond $60 billion, while annual sales eventually peaked at almost $20 billion in 2011. (Thunderbird School of Global Management)
At its subscriber peak in September 2011, BlackBerry reportedly had around 85 million subscribers worldwide. (Wikipedia)
Think about that.
85 million.
BlackBerry had become one of the defining technology brands of its generation.
But there was already a problem.
A massive one.
🍎 2007: Apple Changes the Game
On 9 January 2007, Steve Jobs unveiled Apple’s original iPhone.
And the smartphone industry would never be the same again.
The iPhone looked completely different from the devices dominating business mobile communications.
There wasn’t a traditional physical keyboard.
Instead, almost the entire front of the device was a touchscreen.
BlackBerry had spent years perfecting email, messaging and physical keyboards.
Apple was effectively proposing something different:
The smartphone could become a pocket computer.
Browsing websites, watching video, displaying photographs, listening to music and eventually running thousands upon thousands of downloadable applications became increasingly important.
At first, BlackBerry still had enormous momentum.
In fact, the company continued growing after the iPhone appeared.
That can sometimes get forgotten when people retell the BlackBerry story.
Apple didn’t launch the iPhone one morning and immediately destroy BlackBerry by lunchtime.
The decline took years.
But the direction of the industry was changing.
🤖 Then Android Arrived
If Apple wasn’t enough of a headache, another monster was waking up.
Android.
Google’s mobile operating system allowed manufacturers to produce touchscreen smartphones across numerous price points.
Samsung, HTC, Motorola and others began filling shops with increasingly powerful Android devices.
Suddenly BlackBerry wasn’t fighting one competitor.
It was fighting an ecosystem.
Apple had iOS.
Google had Android.
And both were attracting huge numbers of app developers.
That became absolutely crucial.
Consumers increasingly wanted more than email.
They wanted apps.
Games.
Streaming.
Social media.
Better web browsers.
Bigger touchscreens.
Better cameras.
BlackBerry’s greatest strengths were no longer necessarily the features driving smartphone purchases.
🌩️ The BlackBerry Storm
BlackBerry knew touchscreen devices were becoming important.
Its answer included the BlackBerry Storm, released in 2008.
The Storm removed the traditional physical keyboard and attempted to compete directly with touchscreen smartphones.
But its unusual clickable touchscreen received plenty of criticism, with contemporary reviews reporting sluggish performance and software problems. (TechRadar)
Instead of proving BlackBerry could beat Apple at the touchscreen game, the Storm highlighted how difficult the transition was going to be.
BlackBerry’s traditional operating system had been built for a different generation of mobile device.
The company needed something dramatically newer.
📲 Apps Become the New Battleground
This was arguably one of the biggest shifts BlackBerry struggled to answer quickly enough.
The smartphone was no longer simply a device.
It was becoming a platform.
Apple’s App Store created an enormous marketplace where developers could reach millions of users.
Android followed with its own rapidly expanding ecosystem.
Developers naturally wanted to build applications for the platforms with the biggest growth potential.
Consumers then wanted the phones containing the applications their friends were using.
More users attracted more developers.
More developers created more apps.
More apps attracted more users.
It became a vicious circle for platforms that couldn’t keep pace.
BlackBerry found itself increasingly on the wrong side of it.
📉 BlackBerry Starts Losing Ground
By the early 2010s, the warning signs were becoming impossible to ignore.
Consumers were switching to iPhones and Android devices.
Companies were also changing.
BlackBerry had traditionally enjoyed enormous influence over corporate mobile technology because businesses issued employees standardised company phones.
But the rise of Bring Your Own Device — BYOD — changed things.
Employees increasingly wanted to use their personal smartphones for work.
And increasingly, those phones weren’t BlackBerrys.
The company’s greatest fortress — enterprise customers — was being breached by consumer technology.
🆕 BlackBerry 10: The Big Comeback Attempt
BlackBerry wasn’t going down without a fight.
In January 2013, the company launched BlackBerry 10, a completely redesigned operating system intended to drag the platform into the modern touchscreen era. The first BB10 devices included the touchscreen BlackBerry Z10, followed by the keyboard-equipped Q10. (SEC)
There were genuinely clever ideas.
Gesture navigation felt futuristic.
BlackBerry Hub brought communications together.
Multitasking was impressive.
And BlackBerry continued taking security seriously.
There was just one enormous problem.
It arrived too late.
By 2013, iPhone and Android had already built gigantic ecosystems.
People had purchased applications.
They’d created accounts.
They’d bought accessories.
Their friends were using the same platforms.
Developers were concentrating their resources elsewhere.
Convincing millions of people to switch ecosystem was considerably harder than simply convincing them to buy another telephone.
🅱️ RIM Becomes BlackBerry
The BB10 launch also marked a symbolic change.
Research In Motion officially adopted the name everyone already associated with it:
BlackBerry.
It was supposed to represent a new beginning.
Instead, the following years became a fight for survival in hardware.
🤖 If You Can’t Beat Android…
Eventually BlackBerry tried another strategy.
Android itself.
In 2015, it launched the BlackBerry Priv.
The Priv combined Android with something BlackBerry fans still desperately wanted:
A physical keyboard.
It was an intriguing machine.
But again, BlackBerry was entering a market already dominated by companies selling millions upon millions of Android phones.
The company’s handset business never recovered its former position.
💀 2016: BlackBerry Stops Making Its Own Phones
Then came the moment that effectively ended an era.
In September 2016, BlackBerry announced that it would stop internally developing its own smartphones and instead rely on partners for hardware. (Wikipedia)
BlackBerry-branded Android phones continued appearing through licensing arrangements, including devices manufactured by TCL.
But the company that had helped define the smartphone was no longer really a smartphone manufacturer.
The numbers demonstrate just how dramatic the collapse had been.
Sales had peaked at nearly $20 billion in 2011.
By 2016, they had fallen to around $2.2 billion. (Thunderbird School of Global Management)
It was one of technology’s most spectacular falls.
⚰️ 2022: The Classic BlackBerry Era Officially Ends
One final milestone arrived on 4 January 2022.
BlackBerry discontinued the legacy infrastructure supporting BlackBerry 7.1 and earlier, BlackBerry 10 and BlackBerry PlayBook OS.
The company warned that affected devices would no longer reliably support services including data, calls and SMS. (blackberry.com)
For old-school BlackBerry owners, that date effectively marked the final curtain for the classic BlackBerry platform.
The flashing red light had finally gone dark.
Well…
Sort of.
🤔 So What Actually Killed BlackBerry?
It’s tempting to say:
“The iPhone killed BlackBerry.”
There’s certainly truth in that.
But the complete story is more complicated.
BlackBerry was hit by several massive changes happening almost simultaneously:
- Apple reinvented what consumers expected from smartphones.
- Android created an enormous competing hardware ecosystem.
- Touchscreens replaced physical keyboards as the dominant design.
- Apps became central to the smartphone experience.
- Consumers increasingly influenced corporate IT choices through BYOD.
- BlackBerry struggled to modernise its operating system quickly enough.
- BlackBerry 10 arrived after iOS and Android had established huge ecosystems.
Perhaps BlackBerry’s greatest problem was that the things which made it successful became the things it found hardest to leave behind.
The keyboard.
The enterprise market.
Its own network infrastructure.
Email.
Security.
All were enormous competitive advantages.
Until suddenly the market valued other things more.
🔐 But BlackBerry Didn’t Actually Die
Here’s the interesting bit.
BlackBerry still exists.
It simply isn’t the company most people remember.
BlackBerry completed its transition away from manufacturing smartphones and concentrated increasingly on software, security and embedded systems.
One particularly important piece of the modern company is QNX, whose technology is used in automotive and other embedded systems.
So although you’re unlikely to see someone hammering away on a BlackBerry Curve on the train tomorrow morning, BlackBerry technology hasn’t simply vanished.
The company survived by changing what BlackBerry actually meant.
🧠 BlackBerry’s Legacy Is Bigger Than You Think
It’s easy to laugh at old technology once it becomes obsolete.
But BlackBerry deserves considerably more credit than that.
Many things we now consider completely ordinary in smartphones were demonstrated to millions of users by BlackBerry.
Always-connected mobile email.
Instant internet messaging.
Read receipts.
Group messaging.
Secure mobile communications.
Mobile device management.
And perhaps most importantly, BlackBerry helped normalise the idea that your digital life should travel around in your pocket.
The company didn’t invent every one of those concepts.
But it helped turn them into everyday behaviour.
❤️ Remember BBM?
For millions of people, though, BlackBerry’s legacy isn’t enterprise security or corporate strategy.
It’s nostalgia.
It’s the Curve.
The Bold.
The Pearl.
The little trackball.
Then the trackpad.
That tiny keyboard.
The flashing red notification light.
Changing your BBM status.
Waiting for that little D to become an R.
And, of course:
“Send me your BBM PIN.”
There was something strangely personal about BlackBerry.
Phones today are infinitely more powerful, but they’re also remarkably similar.
Big glass rectangle.
Cameras on the back.
Touchscreen on the front.
BlackBerry had personality.
You could recognise one from across the room.
📱 From 85 Million Subscribers to Smartphone History
The BlackBerry story is one of technology’s greatest cautionary tales.
It shows how quickly a company can go from industry leader to industry outsider when the definition of its market suddenly changes.
BlackBerry didn’t disappear because its original products were rubbish.
Quite the opposite.
It nearly disappeared from smartphones because its original formula had been so successful.
The company had perfected a particular vision of mobile computing just as Apple and Google were creating a completely different one.
BlackBerry helped build the smartphone revolution.
Then the revolution moved beyond it.
But anyone who ever owned a Curve or Bold will probably admit something…
There are days when you still miss that keyboard.
And when you see a little red notification light somewhere?
For half a second…
you can almost hear BBM calling. 📱🔴
Did you own a BlackBerry? What was your weapon of choice — Curve, Bold, Pearl, Torch or something else? And more importantly… can you still remember your BBM PIN?
