BlackBerry Announces the Company Will Stop Making Its Own Phones

It’s the end of an era for BlackBerry. The Canadian company announced Wednesday that it would stop making its own phones, and instead will rely on other companies to design, build and sell the devices. That doesn’t mean, that we will stop seeing BlackBerry-branded devices — it just means that they’ll be built by another company, according to Fortune.

“The company plans to end all internal hardware developments and will outsource that function to partners,” CEO John Chen said in a statement.

Not that any of this comes as a surprise. Earlier this year, Chen said that if BlackBerry’s hardware sales failed to make a profit by September, it could be time to shut down that side of the company’s business. True to his word, the Mobility Solutions division of BlackBerry recorded an $8 million loss this past quarter, according to Engadget.

BlackBerry’s history in the phone market is a long one, and the company’s devices were originally among the top dogs in the earlier days of mobile phones. But like many other phone manufacturers, the company didn’t anticipate, and eventually couldn’t compete with the rise of Apple and Android phones. In 2009, BlackBerry controlled one-fifth of the phone market — today, it holds just over 1 perfect, according to Gartner.

Of course, this move doesn’t signal the end of the company. Rather, it’s indicative of the company’s focus shift away from hardware and toward software and services. BlackBerry will reportedly have little say with future hardware efforts, but will continue to collect royalties for any phone sold by its manufacturing partners. So far, BlackBerry has only named one partner that it will work with: the Indonesia-based BB Merah Putih, CNET reported.

And as of now, it’s not really clear what direction future BlackBerry phones will take. The company previously teased a second Android phone, a device that is now unlikely to ever see the light of day. As for its hardware department, BlackBerry declined to state how many jobs would have to be cut — but did say that the company is looking to complete the shutdown by the end of the fiscal year.

But for as much as this is the era of a chapter for BlackBerry, it’s probably a good idea. Chen’s predecessor, Thorsten Heins, nearly killed the company when he pushed to release a line of phones — like the Z10 — that would try to compete with the likes of Apple and Android flagships. Of course, the Z10’s failure killed that aspiration. But Chen believes that the BlackBerry’s software and service efforts are strong enough to make up for the company’s lack of success on the hardware front.

“We are reaching an inflection point with our strategy,” Chen told CNET, “Our financial foundation is strong, and our pivot to software is taking hold.”