Research In Motion is finally bringing its hugely
popular Blackberry Messenger (BBM) to other platforms before this Ember season.
Announced by CEO Thorsten Heins; “It’s time to bring BBM to a greater
audience, no matter what mobile device they carry.”
This will be
something that converts have been wanting for some time now - Blackberry
Messenger on their new devices. A lot of people
have clamored for the messaging system after moving over to Android
or iOS.
The app will be
released this summer by the Waterloo based company, pending approval from
Google and Apple, and will be compatible with devices running Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and up, and iOS 6 and
up respectively, and most importantly, the app will be free.
Taking the service
cross-platform could allow BlackBerry to potentially attract customers from the
two competing platforms. More likely, it will allow the company to connect its
existing customers to their contacts that do not have BlackBerry devices,
potentially giving them a reason to stay with BlackBerry.
The Blackberry
Messenger app will be as fully featured as the native version, starting with
messaging and groups, and then following up with voice, screen-share and
channels later on as development progresses.
BlackBerry
Messenger has been widely lauded as a solid and secure messaging system, and it
was a point of pride for the company during its heyday. In the years since,
though, a number of platform-specific and cross-platform apps and services have
sprung up.
Heins believes
that Blackberry 10′s new features are going to propel the system along on its
own, allowing them to take BBM and move it cross platform, removing the
exclusivity.
Taking Blackberry
Messenger cross platform is a big move, as it has been a long standing highly
popular feature of the Blackberry ecosystem, and the core of some
of Blackberry’s’ adverts. With already well established messengers
such as WhatsApp, Google Talk and a plethora of others, not to mention Google’s
upcoming unified Hangouts, will BBM be able to hold its own in a crowded
market?
BBM, when it
debuts on Apple's platform, will go up against not only Apple's iMessage
service, which reproduces many of BBM's features as well as its security, but
also third-party apps like WhatsApp. Also the social network Facebook has been
pushing its Facebook Messenger service on both Android and iOS.
BBM will also have
competition from a recently revamped Google service, Hangouts, which Google has
used to tie together its disparate messaging services into a more cohesive single
system.
Will you be using
the new cross platform Blackberry Messenger when it arrives? Or will you
be waiting for Googles new Hangouts? Let us know in the comments below!
With Excerpt from:
The
Verge
