BlackBerry cries foul
by Volker Weber
Recently, Facebook made the decision to discontinue support of their essential APIs for BlackBerry and WhatsApp announced they would end support for BlackBerry 10 and BBOS at the end of 2016.
We are extremely disappointed in their decision as we know so many users love these apps. We fought back to work with WhatsApp and Facebook to change their minds, but at this time, their decision stands (but let them know how you feel on social media, using the hashtag #ILoveBB10Apps). Despite this, we have worked hard to ensure our end users have the best experience in light of this decision, and are continuing to search for alternate solutions.
Comments
Trying out Face10 pro and it seems to work much better than the facebook app. I will let you know how well works.
I've been using Face10 since it was in the public beta. It is indeed very promising, and does lots of things much better than the stock app did (readable font size, support for groups, support for downloading images in shared contents, ...).
In the forums the developer mentioned that he has no access to some APIs, e.g. those that would allow him to implement a couple of features, e.g. group chats (a feature that the stock app had). Also, being a one-man enterprise he has been rather slow adding still missing features and fixing bugs after the public release.
Still in my opinion Face10 in combination with the messenger are already much better than the stock Facebook app ever was.
My question is: if BlackBerry loses access to Facebook APIs, don't 3rd party developers suffer the same way?
That was already discussed by users in the forum, but the developer has not yet replied to it. I am not terribly aware which APIs are general and which are specific for BB10. As the developer already complained about not having access to some APIs that the stock app had, this indicates that there were BB10-specific APIs not available to 3rd party developers. That again would indicate that Face10 might not be affected by them being shut down.
But, sure, that's speculation. Discussion (with lots of noise) is here on CrackBerry: http://forums.crackberry.com/blackberry-10-apps-f274/face10-facebook-alternative-client-1052482/index109.html
Facebook's mobile website works quite well for reading FB stuff on BB10. Calender, contacts and sharing framework integration made the original app so useful to me, and so did the ability to reply to event invitations and friend request right in the hub. I don't expect to see such a tight integration with a 3rd party app.
Face10/Messenger has this tight integration. I don't miss any of this now.
The Mobile version of the site is so well written, I haven't missed the app.
That being said, we can side load the Android version until it breaks.
But, for many, getting that version on their devices is challenging to many.
