BlackBerry confirms it will no longer manufacture the BB10 BlackBerry Classic smartphone
Former mobile phone giant BlackBerry has announced it will cease manufacturing its BB 10-powered BlackBerry Classic smartphone. — The news comes less than a week after we revealed that the Canadian company …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Classic was launched in December 2014 as BlackBerry's bid to win back keyboard loyalists with a full QWERTY and physical navigation keys on BB10. Its confirmed end of manufacturing is the clearest signal yet that the bet failed to reverse the company's handset decline.
The move foreshadows what came next in the arc: within months BlackBerry announced it would end in-house phone development entirely after a $372M quarterly loss, outsourcing devices to partners, and by 2020 even the licensed TCL-made BlackBerry phones were wound down when that deal expired.
First-order effects
- BB10 customers and enterprise buyers lose their last keyboard-centric flagship, shrinking BlackBerry's own-device lineup to whatever remains outside the Classic.
- BlackBerry's manufacturing and supply chain for the Classic winds down immediately, shifting remaining BB10 demand onto a platform already scheduled for reduced support.
Second-order effects
- With its own hardware failing, BlackBerry is pushed further toward the partner-licensing model it formalized in September 2016, letting others design and sell devices while it keeps the brand.
- App developers face a shrinking installed base for BB10, compounding the pressure that later led BlackBerry to schedule the World app store's shutdown at the end of 2019.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, BlackBerry exits device manufacturing altogether and repositions as a software and security company — the trajectory the coverage shows playing out through the TCL licensing arrangement and its eventual end.
- Keyboard-phone nostalgia becomes a niche no single vendor owns, leaving former BlackBerry users to migrate to rival platforms or third-party hardware carrying the brand under license.
The trend: BlackBerry is executing a staged retreat from making phones — flagship cuts first, then outsourced development, then licensed-only branding — as it converts itself into a software and security business.