BBM or the Blackberry messenger is an important part of the Blackberry devices and it is one of the reasons why people choose them over iPhone or Android smartphones available in the market. Now it seems like one of the hottest feature of Blackberry, BBM will soon debut on iOS and Android platforms. There have been reports of Blackberry bringing BBM to other company’s devices before but that didn’t happen as analysts believe that Blackberry restrained from making the popular service available on other platforms so users stick to Blackberry devices.
Until now people who had shifted from Blackberry to more popular iOS and Android devices used to miss the BBM service but that is going to change now. The official announcement was made by Blackberry CEO Thorsten Heins. The messaging service will be available to worldwide users this summer.
The move is significant not only for users who will be able to use perhaps the best messaging service for smartphones but for the Blackberry company as well because it will expose the Blackberry OS’s best feature to millions of iOS and Android users – most of which have never owned a Blackberry smartphone. Blackberry is apparently hoping to give them opportunity to taste the candy and if they like it they could jump towards the BB ship.
Blackberry is very confident in its BB 10 platform that the company recently launched with Z10 and other devices. The company’s CEO Heins says that “It is a state of confidence,” and “The BB10 platform is so strong and the response has been so good that the time is right for BBM to become an independent mobile messaging platform.”
Blackberry has announced that at launch the app and the service will be available to iOS users for free and will require iOS 6 and Ice Cream Sandwich software versions. At first the messaging service will be made available to the users of other devices but Heins promised that all other features of Blackberry will also come to the iOS and Android versions of the service including the BBM channels, BBM voice as well as Screen Sharing.