Originally Posted by
Troy Tiscareno Like any other phone after it completes its update cycle (ALL phones have a limit to how long they are updated for), what happens is that new vulnerabilities are discovered, reported privately to the appropriate company who is responsible for fixing them, and then 30 days later, those vulnerabilities are PUBLISHED for anyone to read. The purpose of publishing these is to create pressure on the companies (via the media primarily) to actually FIX the problems, and for the most part, they do... on devices that are still being supported. Devices that are outside the support window (which includes ALL BB-branded phones at this point) will not get any updates, and so they will be vulnerable to any and all flaws and exploits found after the end of the support window.
Obviously, as time goes on, and more and more flaws are discovered, the phone is more and more vulnerable to being hacked or otherwise accessed. And not all vulnerabilities are even reported - if some hacker, rather than an actual security researcher or random coder finds a vulnerability, they will keep that to themselves and use it to exploit devices (usually by the hundreds of thousands) and usually no one will even know until later - sometimes much later.
The generally accepted guideline is that once a device's support window ends, you have about 90 days before, on average, there are enough significant vulnerabilities that you cannot consider your device to be "safe" - at least, not as a primary device that has access to your primary email accounts, passwords, banking or credit card information, etc. If you are using it as a secondary device, with fake email accounts and no important data, then security is going to be less of a concern. Each person has to evaluate their own exposure based on how they use their device and what requirements they have to keep their data (or, worse, their customers' data) safe. But any way you look at it, time works against you - the longer it's been without security patches, the more vulnerabilities a device has - and some of them are considered "severe".
If you live in the US, you are also just a few months away from the start of the 3G shutdown/5G transition, which is going to have some negative impacts on all older, non-5G-capable devices. That's separate from BB's shutdown of sevices for BBOS and BB10 phones (which don't affect BB Android phones except for the app suite, which has already been essentially abandoned for the last 2 years already and will continue to break as standards evolve and leave it behind) - BB Android phones don't require BB services like BB ID - it uses Google accounts like any other Android phone.
The bottom line is that most users should be planning on transitioning to a 5G phone sometime in the next 6 months, especially if you use your phone as your "primary" with your primary email accounts, bank accounts, credit card info, etc., because your BB-branded phone isn't secure anymore and will only become less secure with time - plus the cellular network changes will cause reduced coverage that could leave you without a signal in certain areas.