BlackBerry’s iconic mobile messaging app called BBM has shown a new surge of success by notching up the 100 million downloads on Android platform. BBM for Android devices has made its way to the magic figures of 100 million downloads in the Google Play Store where it has debuted a year and half back. BlackBerry is in joyous mood and has even revealed that over 1 billion of its stickers which appear like emoticon like standard illustrations have been sent via it messaging app. This news was released officially on the company’s blog where it declared about the download statistics long with events happening at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
BlackBerry Today and Yesterday
BlackBerry had faltered behind the rise of the Android based and Apple phone devices in the last decade. Its Smartphones had lagged in the terms of sale and popularity by its own inability to bring in consumer centric features rather than relying on the traditional features. However in last few years BlackBerry had covered the lost ground by unleashing new and smarter phones along with bringing its messaging app in the public domain.
At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona BlackBerry has unveiled its latest offering of $275 touchscreen Smartphone called Leap and an unmade slider phone device possessing a traditional keyboard. Apart from these a special Porsche edition device will also be released in the latter half of the year.
BlackBerry Messenger popularly known as BBM was the sole distinguishable and important feature of the BlackBerry devices but it was only available on its devices strictly. In order to give boost to its brand and capture more messaging crowd it has released its BBM app for all three popular mobile OS platform i.e. iOS, Android and Microsoft Windows.
BBM App Shows Promise but Fails To Compete
The mobile based messaging applications market is filled with huge number of competitors from the Facebook’s owned WhatsApp, China Based WeChat, Facebook messaging App to multiple third part apps. Among such stiff competition BBM has registered a robust statics which points towards downloads at 100 million on Android devices only. Still BBM is a small fish in the vast ocean it accounts just at 91 million of active users which is quite low considering the other popular messaging apps.
WhatsApp has registered the download at Google Play store between a mind-boggling 1 billion and 5 billion. Facebook Messenger claims between 500 million to 1 billion while WeChat is in between 100 million to 500 million. Apart from the download BBM even lags behind the percentage of active users which are critical to the success of the messaging app. WhatsApp shows a robust figure of 700 million monthly active users in January and WeChat showed 468 million monthly active users in November.
BlackBerry has revealed this figure just a few days later of enhancing its android app functionality and features. The current update to the BBM allows it to add Android Wear support as well as ability to share photos in the group chats and many other additional benefits.
