In light Facebook opting to discontinue support of their essential APIs for BlackBerry and WhatsApp announcing they would be ending support for BlackBerry 10 and BlackBerry OS devices at the end of 2016, Lou Gazzola, head of App Ecosystem and the Developer Outreach team at BlackBerry has now taken to the company blog to reiterate BlackBerry's strong commitment to the BlackBerry developer community.

The app landscape continues to evolve, and in ways that are not always within our control. 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.

Our commitment to BlackBerry 10 and to developers has not changed – we know our developer community continues to be one of the strongest proponents of BlackBerry 10, and they are creating thousands of apps every month. As a way to support them and to promote new apps, we're now featuring some of the best native applications on BlackBerry World in a list called "Great Apps on BlackBerry." The category will be a list of 20 applications, featured for two weeks, once per month, similar to the way we feature apps on the BlackBerry World Carousel. We're also continuing whenever we can to invest in apps important to users, such as the update to the Twitter app released today with important fixes and another update coming in a month with new features. This ensures that our many BlackBerry 10 customers have the best OS and apps possible.

We look forward to new apps and new customers on BlackBerry 10 and thank our developer community for their continued strong support!

As a BlackBerry 10 user, it's hard to not be frustrated by some of the recent events but at least with these comments now being put out there, there's a better understanding of what exactly is happening and clarification on the fact that BlackBerry is still looking for alternate solutions.

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