Blackberry has announced that the Blackberry PRIV, the first Android based device the company released two years ago, will no longer be seeing regular updates. The news isn’t shocking and fits with what most manufactures, including Google, do when it comes to software updates. Most only go out 24 months from release of the device.
For their part, Blackberry is doing their best to spin the news, indicating that they made the PRIV more secure out-of-the-box and it needed less patching anyway. They also indicated that they will be providing updates should a critical security flaw be discovered and that warranty support is still provided.
Blackberry released the PRIV with Lollipop 5.1 and later updated it to Marshmallow 6.0. Rumors circulated for a while that a Nougat 7.0 update was in the works but that never came to be on the device.
The Blackberry PRIV was unique in that it brought back a physical keyboard to a phone and was the company’s first Android-based phone. It was met with some fans but overall did not perform exceptionally well in the market. This is likely due to consumers not being sure Blackberry was going to stick around and the price point of the PRIV.
If you have a PRIV, despite the company’s words, it may be time to investigate another phone.
