Hey, remember when BlackBerry was going to
officially roll out BBM for iOS and Android a few
weekends ago only to be stymied by technical
issues? At the time it was yet another dark mark
on BlackBerry’s already sketchy record, but things
are finally starting to look up. The company confirmed on its Inside BlackBerry blog that the messaging app will go live in the Android and iOS app stores for new
users once more at some point today.
It’s a good thing, too. Considering the sorts of
troubles that BlackBerry has been dealing with
lately, it’s a little heartening to see that the
company has finally managed to iron out the wrinkles with one of its biggest cross-platform
pushes in recent memory. If you happen to be one
of the six million (!) people who threw your name
into the “I Want BBM” hat, you’ll be able to start
using the apps right away. Unfortunately, the rest
of us will be stuck a queue waiting for our turn to really use the apps, though the company noted
that it was we “focused on moving millions of
customers through the line as fast as possible.”
Curiously enough, BlackBerry also crowed about
the fact that over 1 million Android users had
installed an iffy pre-release version of the application. To be fair that’s a pretty significant
indicator of demand, but those people are also
partially to blame for the BBM delay as a whole —
that early version of the app generated amounts
of data traffic that BBM head Andrew Bocking said
was “orders of magnitude higher than normal for each active user”, and at the time there was no
way to launch a new, fixed version of the app
without effectively screwing over all of the people
who installed the illicit version.
That not-so-little issue has apparently been
cleared up though, but BlackBerry has offered little guidance on what sort of wait times
interested users will have to endure before they
can start BBMing each other. We’ll soon see how
annoying this process really is, but in Blackberry’s
defense, it really can’t afford to botch this whole
thing a second time. A slow, manageable trickle of new users is definitely a nice change of pace from
the damning traction seen at the end of
September, but there are still plenty of potential
problems BBM still has to face — think WhatsApp,
Viber, Voxer, Google Hangouts, Facebook
Messenger, Line, Kakaotalk, and all those other entrenched messaging apps. The path to
continued relevance is a tricky one, but at least
BBM is finally ready to leave the gate.
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