This seems like it’s BlackBerry’s last effort to stay in the Instant Messaging industry. The company announced this Monday that privacy and control features within their messaging app BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) to be completely free, exonerating the previous $1 price tag.

We should also remember that BBM is available not only to BlackBerry smartphones but also to iOS and Android, and those are getting a “bonus” feature, having unlimited access to Retract and Timer when they needed before the user has had a BBM subscription. Both features allowed the user to delete from yours and recipient’s outbox messages and set a limit on how long your message content, and even location could be viewed from the other users respectively.

The company announced this Monday that privacy and control features within their messaging app BBM to be completely free, exonerating the previous $1 price tag. Photo credit:   Social Geek
The company announced this Monday that privacy and control features within their messaging app BBM to be completely free, exonerating the previous $1 price tag. Photo credit: Social Geek

BBM’s Senior Vice President Matthew said these new releases provides unmatched levels of privacy and control of BBM users without any subscription fees – that were previously $1 per month –, and also keeping control over the messages and the shared content, creating a safety feeling to BBM users about the user’s control of the messages that are being shared.

Some other features were included, just like forwarding messages from one chat to another and mute notifications from a multi-chat on Android– Whatsapp too much I must say? –, with BBM will stop working on Android Marshmallow (6.0). Other updates included for iOS are video-sharing related, since now users can capture and share longer-lasting videos on the new chat screen look BBM offer to their users.

How popular is BBM these days?

Why is BBM struggling to survive these days? We all know that BBM was one of the first mobile IM app released in August 2005 –10 years ago? We’re getting old, fellas – and until 2015 they had over 190 million active users. Now here’s the deal – and maybe the main reason that BBM wants a “glorious comeback” –, Whatsapp have recently passed over a billion monthly users, Facebook’s Messenger is about 800 million users and the most recently app Telegram passed the 100 million users – and all of them are increasing their numbers every day–.

Source: The Economic Times