BlackBerry announced plans to move BBM across to multiple rival platforms, in a move to make sure everyone has the BlackBerry messaging experience on their smartphone.
This feature has been rumoured for a while and we expected BB10 to be the first BlackBerry operating system licensed to third parties. However, BlackBerry decided they wanted to keep the end-to-end integration.
BBM has been one of the biggest selling feature for BlackBerry devices, at least on the consumer front. BlackBerry developed unique codes and a simple messenger to entice users into the service.
Since those glory days BlackBerry has lost a lot of influence in the smartphone market, coming from 45% to 7%, we expect that Thorsten Heins and BlackBerry understand the need for cross platform and how it could benefit BlackBerry in the long run.
Currently WhatsApp, Skype and Facebook Messenger offer cross platform communication with friends, Facebook utilises the users vast amount of friends, Skype uses its own contacts and WhatsApp uses phone contacts and social network contacts.
BBM has a tough road ahead to try and defeat these competitors, especially when all three have much larger audiences than BBM now. WhatsApp currently has 300 million users and Skype has around the same number, Facebook has 1 billion users.
BlackBerry plans to roll out screen sharing, voice and video calls later this year to Android and iOS and we suspect later updates to the service will be pushed to BlackBerry first and then to other platforms.
No word on Windows Phone, with the ongoing battle for third place in the smartphone market, BlackBerry may see Windows as the competition right now, as Android and iOS dominate the market.
BBM will work with any iOS device running iOS6 and any Android device running Ice Cream Sandwich or above. This is the first step in BlackBerry’s cross platform offering, we have heard rumours of a full BlackBerry launcher coming to Android.
