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BlackBerry Facebook app will cease to work on BlackBerry 10 and BBOS from March 31st

Rapid John·
BlackBerry
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Another day and another challenge for BlackBerry users as BlackBerry have today announced that as of March 31st, 2016 BlackBerry smartphone users will have to perform an update for the BlackBerry Facebook app in order to continue using Facebook.

The current BlackBerry Facebook application will cease to work on BlackBerry smartphones running BlackBerry 10 and BlackBerry OS  versions 7.1 and earlier and those wishing to continue using Facebook are encouraged to move to the web-based experience which will provide the most feature rich alternative.

BlackBerry point out that the reason why Android and iOS continue to have a native application, but not BlackBerry is down to the fact the native Facebook application on other platforms use a private API not available for general use, and has not been made available to BlackBerry.

Quite correctly, BlackBerry refuse to use any api’s illegally in order to produce an up-to-date Facebook app.

BlackBerry state that the following capabilities will be gained using the updated version of the application on both platforms.

  • Ability to reply to comments and see replies to comments.
  • All posts should be loaded, no more “News feed could not be retrieved” or “Post could not be loaded” messages (unless the post was actually removed).
  • Any features available to Facebook website users will be available to you in the updated application.

In addition, users who update to the latest version will lose the following functionality:

  • BlackBerry 10 Facebook contact synchronization:
    Upon upgrading to the latest version of the application, Facebook contacts will no longer synchronize with the on-device Contacts application.
  • BlackBerry Hub integration:
    Messages/Chat, posts, friend requests, games, invites and other notifications will no longer show as entries in BlackBerry Hub.
  • BlackBerry 10 smartphones will no longer have the ability to share items like pictures and videos directly to Facebook using the Share icon.

For near real time notifications, you can set up SMS or E-mail notifications on the FaceBook website here.

To transition to the web based experience, users should visit BlackBerry World on their device and apply the available update for the Facebook application at the following links: