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BBM Available for Android and iPhone
- pearjuice 13y agoToo little, too late. Whatsapp has taken the throne in multi-platform messaging quite some time ago. Just like Facebook and Google+, no matter how good and innovative the latter is, as long as all your friends are still on the former, the latter will not gain much traction.
- synchronise 13y agoNo one in Australia uses Whatsapp, I have no idea how everyone else in the world communicates but everyone uses Skype or Facebook Chat to talk to each other here. Also, everyone I know wouldn't pay for a communications protocol, no matter how good it is.
- zainny 13y agoI live in Australia and use Whatsapp and so do lots of other people I know.
- synchronise 13y agoI'm not joking here, the only people I've seen use it are foreign exchange students, and I go to a university. I keep hearing how it's big, but then I don't see any real world use over here.
- enko 13y agoI also live in Australia and use Whatsapp all the time. Skype is way too heavyweight. Facebook ... I do not trust facebook at all, and do not wish to tie up my messaging capabilities with them. > Also, everyone I know wouldn't pay for a communications protocol, no matter how good it is. Dude, it's a dollar. One dollar. That's your contribution to the infrastructure that is handling 27 billion messages a day. Was your phone free? Are your phone calls and SMS free? Is anything else in life free? I don't get it.
- fungi 13y agoi believe wechat and line are both bigger.
- jng 13y agoIt's distributed on a very per-country basis. WhatsApp is used by over 90% of people in Spain, to the detriment of others. It shows how the success of this kind of thing depends more on network effects than on product quality - only one of them is exactly homogeneous across countries.
- tpiddy 13y agoI really like LINE better than Whatsapp.
- w1ntermute 13y agoNobody uses LINE outside of East Asia.
- zmmmmm 13y agoThe missing element is trust, particularly in the professional / business market. I wouldn't dream of suggesting Whatsapp to my professional contacts. But BBM I just might, especially if they are (or were in the past) already blackberry users, so probably have an identity there.
- acchow 13y agoI don't use Whatsapp. It feels kind of anti-internet to me. When your phone's battery dies, you can just keep checking your Whatsapp messages on your computer right? False. Want to switch smartphone platforms, just log in to Whatsapp on your new phone and all your old messages (read: PHOTOS) are expectedly there, right? HAH. Moved countries, and now I need to broadcast on my Facebook wall asking people to re-add me on Whatsapp? Because I got a new phone number? An app running on my supercomputer in my pocket with a retina display is still tied to a phone number? Are you fucking kidding me? I use FB chat and Hangouts. I would use FB chat exclusively but it can't do video calls.
- alien3d 13y agoyou can just keep checking your Whatsapp messages on your computer right? True I'm using bluestack software.I only checking whatsapp only office hour only.
- ishansharma 13y agoThere's a difference! Bluestack is a workaround. Better situation would be at least a web app. An app that integrates Whatsapp with Windows and Macs (like iMessages work on Macs) will be a great idea.
- acchow 13y agoDoes it do syncing? That is, while you're having a conversation on Bluestack on your computer and then you don't get a reply for a while, and when you get a reply on your phone, you completely forget what the conversation was about: will your phone show a history of the conversation from the computer?
- ishansharma 13y agoI agree with you on this one. I have no idea how every company running after messaging just forgets that we use computers! Almost every messenger app out there doesn't work on desktops. A simple web app will do, but no! iMessages are quite close to what messaging should be. They work on your (Apple) desktop, phone and tablet and sync quite well. Too bad they're only for Apple Ecosystem!
- einhverfr 13y agoOne of the big things though is that BBM is big over here in Indonesia and is the main selling point for Blackberry. It seems odd, but blackberries are consumer smartphones over here. This could go one of two ways: 1. BBM could become a larger service that Blackberry finds some other way to leverage, or 2. This could lead to the loss of the last few really major captive markets for BBM. I don't think that Blackberry can survive withotu finding a way to leverage BBM in these markets.
- ishansharma 13y agoI can't say about WhatsApp in other countries but their usage is going to take a hit in India once they start charging(they plan to charge $0.99 per year, that is ~INR 60), people will flock. Reasons: 1. People in India are too used to "free" software. Only legal software most purchase here is Windows that comes bundled with laptops/desktops. 2. Low credit card penetration. Most of the teens don't have credit cards. Thanks to government rules, we can't use debit cards to pay on App Stores as well. So people either won't pay or can't pay. Many are already starting to use other apps and there is no shortage of free apps due to exploding messaging space.
- richardw 13y agoThe only reason it's free is so WhatsApp can make money at some point. If there are people who won't pay, ever, then there's less reason to keep them as users. Not "no reason", however. I'm sure WhatsApp could find a way to monetise them, or just leverage them for network effect. WhatsApp is a lightweight replacement for text messages, not a full-blown social network. You pay a buck, you get free text messages, not unending trickery to overcome your privacy options. I have WhatsApp contacts worldwide, so even if some countries reduce their usage there's benefit in sticking with it. For $100 I'd stop using it. For $10, I'd think about it. $1 is a no-brainer, and I live in Africa. Now I just wish they had a supported, paid-for API I could integrate with.
- narzac 13y agoAnonymity is still important to some though, since whatsapp by default uses phone number vs bbm's pin number, some users may shift to bbm. It is late, but may be not too late.
- newsign 13y agowhats app has a huge privacy & security issue and their user are realizing it now so i hope BBM become their next choice .... it would be great if someone introduces true encryption though :)
- harrytuttle 13y agoGoing to have to sell my Lumia 820 quick! Sarcasm aside, BBM in the UK is relegated to children at school. I imagine it's pretty much the same across the rest of Europe at least. SMS is pretty much free here so we just use that or email. As a result of this, I don't get why this is touted as a super-important move for RIM/BlackBerry/Whatever they are called now.
- jamesaguilar 13y agoI think it's mostly that it was one of the first free, popular messaging services, at a time when text messages in the US were a lot more expensive. I have never used it myself, so I can't say for sure. It does seem fairly irrelevant in the modern day and age.
- _stuart 13y agoWhy is it irrelevant? Messaging apps like WhatsApp, KaoKaoTalk, and Viber are hugely popular.
- jamesaguilar 13y agoMaybe I spoke incautiously. I should have said, "Less relevant." And although I understand these other apps have big user-bases, none of them have anything like the penetration of unlimited SMS, if I had to guess.
- lesbaker 13y agoWhen you have a family plan with multiple lines, even the first level block text messaging plans add up quickly. (I'm on Verizon in the USA). I feel the whole text message surcharge system is just a racket, so any way I can beat that is fine by me.
- jonnathanson 13y agoIt's pretty much the only service anyone who owned (owns?) a Blackberry ever raved about. Yes, they had easy-to-use email before anyone else did. But BBM really was a great chat service, and it was way ahead of its time. I'm not sure how it stands up against the competition now, as I haven't owned a Blackberry in many years. But it was a really solid service back in the day, and I think a lot of people out there still love it. I doubt this saves Blackberry/RIM/the_artist_formerly_known_as_RIM from extinction, but it's an interesting move.
- jpmonette 13y agoBy reading this, I understand why BlackBerry is still way behind. BBM was cool maybe 6 years ago, so what is breaking about this? Facebook Messenger can do the same as BBM, and a lot more. What's the point of installing this app?
- chancancode 13y agoSo you can discover which of your friends are still on BBM, and get them to switch over to iMessage/whatsapp/facebook message ;)
- zhuzhuor 13y agoI had a BB 9800 and a BB 9900 before, and switched to Android phones for couples of years. From my own experience, BBM is still the most stable and comfortable IM app on mobile phones. I still miss the feeling about using BBM. I guess the backend service part of RIM/Blackberry is still somehow ahead of other manufacturers.
- xutopia 13y agoWhy would an Android or iPhone user install BBM? I don't get the value proposition here. I'm not being disingenuous.
- umsm 13y agoI'm wondering the same thing. iMessage offers all of what they are stating as features. But, I have never really used a Blackberry device before. Additionally, I wonder if releasing this sooner would've saved them or changed history a little...
- ojilles 13y agoI have owned a blackberry for years, used intensively. If they had done this way earlier, it could have saved them a bit. However, I think what they would have had to do is the other way around: a iMessage app on a blackberry. Obviously wasn't going to happen either.
- netcraft 13y agoI think the fact that they are releasing it now is an admission of defeat. I know a few people that kept their blackberry as long as they did only because of BBM, so I can understand them not releasing it sooner, but I agree, a couple of years ago you might have convinced someone that blackberry was a good platform because they liked the bbm service on the iphone. A long shot maybe, but at least a shot.
- MAGZine 13y agoEXCEPT iMessage isn't Crossplatform. I'd install iMessage on my nexus 4 if it was a drop-in replacement for my SMS client and was a solid, Apple-quality app.
- shurcooL 13y agoMessage Protocol X: supports chat, runs on iOS Message Protocol Y: supports chat, runs on iOS, Android, Blackberry. I absolutely love iMessage, but I hate that I can't use it with anyone who owns android.
- 13y ago
- MAGZine 13y agoWaiting so long means they now have severely diminished marketshare when it comes to hardware, and thusly, Android/iPhone users have no reason to pick it up. Maybe if they released this 4 years ago, people would use it and at least BlackBerry would still be relevant in the messenger space. Instead, now they get to compete with Kik, WhatsApp, and a myriad of other cross-platform messaging apps. Employees of BB-centric companies may be happy, though.
- rabino 13y agoI personally know a lot of people that stay on BlackBerry just for BBM. I hope I'm wrong, but this may be very bad for the BlackBerry platform.
- shurcooL 13y agoOr the opposite. Do you retain more people through fear and lock in, or do you gain more by being open and transparent?
- glhaynes 13y agoWhen one of your last advantages is from lock-in, giving up that lock-in seems… risky, at the very least. Edit: Not that hanging onto it would help them either.
- grannyg00se 13y agoI used to be one. But then so many people were using Whatsapp I started using that. Fewer and fewer people were using BBM. Even fewer still were the number of people who used BBM exclusively. Now I don't think I'll miss BBM at all and as a result I'm looking to Android for my next phone.
- krschultz 13y agoSurprising that they are not supporting pre-Ice Cream Sandwich Android devices.
- malexw 13y agoWhen we were building the Groups feature of BBM back in 2009, a core feature of the new transport layer was device-to-device message encryption. I wonder if that's still a part of BBM, or if it's been stripped out since then... If messages are still encrypted, I'd install the new app on my Android phone just for that feature.
- pmelendez 13y agoDon't they got removed after India government complained it was too hard to hack? I remember they even threatened them with ban BBM on India.
- malexw 13y agoI don't know. I left RIM before that all unfolded. From what I recall, the Indian government was appeased by RIM offering to install a Relay in India, and giving the Indian government access to it. However, even having access to the Relay shouldn't compromise the integrity of encrypted BBM because it used peer-to-peer public/private key crypto. When you added a new contact, the devices would perform a handshake and exchange public keys, so even the Relay shouldn't be able to see cleartext BBM. This was a feature baked into the BBM app itself, built on top of the PIN message system, and separate from the encryption used in a BES environment. So did they shut off BBM encryption for the whole world? I wish I knew.
- pedrocr 13y agoBBM doesn't seem like much of a win but a blackberry email client would be smart. As far as I know they're the only ones that have an efficient mobile email client that does things like not download a huge file just to upload it again when you forward a message with an attached document. That's the only reason I've heard for people keeping Blackberrys instead of switching to iPhones or Androids.
- brk 13y agoReally? That's a reason for staying with Blackberry? Curious who/what these users are. Is there some case where users are primarily dealing with email on a mobile device AND forwarding around lots of attachments? I'll admit, I like that idea, but not enough to stick with an (IMO) highly antiquated platform just to get better attachment forwarding.
- pedrocr 13y agoWell, these days the reasons for staying with Blackberry are getting slimmer and slimmer. In corporate situations forwarding around documents in emails does tend to be a pretty big use case. We really need "pass by reference" in emails but no one has really cracked the "dropbox for enterprises" use case. Nomadesk is supposed to be that and so far seems pretty buggy (the "lose your files" kind of buggy). Maybe the aerofs guys will fix that.
- omh 13y agoThey recently released this for the corporate side of things. "Secure Workspace" is a self contained BB-based email app, which connects to the BES stuff on the back end. Looks very nice from a corporate security point of view. But I'm not sure how good it is if you're looking for a "Blackberry UI". Anecdotally that seems to be as much about the old (non-touch) BB devices and their physical keyboards.
- pedrocr 13y agoThat sounds awesome. I need to check with corporate IT to see if they'll provision that with the BYOD Android program.
- andor 13y agoGreat, another phone messenger that I can't use on my computer. Convergence is definitely the future!
- derefr 13y agoI really wish there was a defined API for "messaging service backend" that iOS/Android understood. (XMPP? IRC?) iMessage can intelligently switch between Apple's own backend and SMS depending on data connection and presence information; why can't I tell it about a contact's Facebook profile, or Twitter username, or BBM address, or WhatsApp username, etc., and have it transport the messages over whichever one looks to be most recently active?
- majani 13y agoWindows phone does this with its in built "Me" app. Its quite neat, but consumes tons of data due to the constant syncing.
- shirkey 13y ago> Message can intelligently switch between Apple's own backend and SMS depending on data connection and presence information I'm not familiar with the Apple implementation, but something similar was implemented by the Yahoo Messenger client app running on my Windows Mobile several years back, seamlessly switching from Internet data connection to SMS -- resulting in an SMS for every single outbound message and a bill of around $300 from AT&T for all those "OK" and "Sure" messages.
- mikeash 13y agoFortunately for those of us without SMS plans, iMessage lets you turn off the SMS fallback, and displays a clear visual distinction when it gets used.
- hokkos 13y agoLike with Blackberry 10 they are too late.
- zainny 13y agoAnd at the same time as releasing this, they've just laid off 40% of the company. The tried and true PR tactic of trying to hide bad news: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323808204579083250005557232.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732380820457908... Alternative source for those who can't access WSJ: http://www.engadget.com/2013/09/18/wsj-blackberry-expected-to-cut-up-to-40-percent-of-workforce/ http://www.engadget.com/2013/09/18/wsj-blackberry-expected-t...
- narzac 13y agoThe capitalist acts of desperation to increase company profit... First motivate the employees to write the İOS and Android app, they will be working their asses off, hoping the company will survive. Then fire them. Voila!
- MBCook 13y agoIt's not working. I just heard about the job cuts on NPR, but I didn't hear anything about BlackBerry messenger app.
- josteink 13y agoThey also release a phablet phone amid all this nonsense. The timing of all this is very, very odd.
- jrn 13y agoI don't think that's bad news. But the markets disagreed and the price took a hit. It's been awesome to see the new management's discipline, should have cut earlier but they got the major planks laid out, new os, android run time, backend services, browser. Just refinements left. Employee count to revenue is getting good. 6 devices a year. Simple. And the new phone has the paratek antenna, this is going to be close.
- nl 13y agoAnd the new phone has the paratek antenna, this is going to be close So the new antenna is what will save BlackBerry?
- username724 13y agoWhat's the catch? There's always something that winds up costing end users either money or data. What will it be with these BBM ports? If there's really no gothca lurking in the darkness then I'm all for it!
- kennywinker 13y agoI think this is a smart move. When BB was on top, letting other devices on to their messaging platform would have been a mistake (which is, incidentally why iMessage is single-platform). Now that they're trailing hard in market share, making BBM cross platform means blackberry users are less isolated. They have had to switch strategies, but that they are actively adapting to their new reality is a good sign. They should have done this a year ago at least.
- tpiddy 13y agoIt's a shame Apple won't release iMessage for Android
- Steko 13y agoI'd wager the odds of Blackberry Android handsets in the next year just went to overwhelming, I doubt they will get one out before xmas though.
- shyn3 13y agoWhere is the desktop/web version!