BLACKBERRY MESSENGER GOES CROSS PLATFORM

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