BlackBerry on Tuesday announced that BBM is slated to launch this summer for Apple’s iPhone and for Android devices.
The announcement came during the company’s Blackberry Live conference and details are limited thus far, though BlackBerry did confirm that messaging services and the new BlackBerry Channels service will both be supported by BBM for iOS and Android.
In the first version of multi-platform BBM, iOS and Android users are expected to be able to experience the following BBM features:
* The immediacy of BBM chats
* Multi-person chats
* Voice note sharing
* BlackBerry Groups, where BBM users are able to set up groups of up to 30 people and share calendar, photos, files and more
BBM will support iOS hardware running iOS 6 and above; the Android version will be compatible with version 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and above.
Some facts:
BBM connects over 60 million users today reliably offering many advantages over other messengers like whatsapp or even iMessage.
Over 10 billion messages are transported by the reliable servers everyday.
Almost half of these 10 billion messages are read within 20 seconds of receiving the message.
BBM on iOS and Android
The first version of multi-platform BBM will offer BBM chats, multi-person chats, voice note sharing, and BlackBerry Groups.
It was rumored that BlackBerry has been planning to offer BBM on rival platforms for quite some time. With services like WhatsApp, iMessage and Kik dominating the messaging world, BBM will finally expand beyond the BlackBerry platform. Hopefully it will be approved by Google and Apple for their app stores without any issues.
Soon after Blackberry tweeted about the big news, Twitter users reacted to the move.
Twitter reaction:
Indeed, the exclusivity that Blackberry carried with its BBM feature will now be lost. Will this affect the brand value and sales of Blackberry phones?
Only time can tell.
