Blackberry Messenger was there before the iPhone and Android. Remember the days when having a BBM used to be a status symbol? People carrying Blackberry phones were either businessmen or celebs. However, with the iPhone entering the market, there was a major shift. It was just like a shiny new toy and everyone wanted a piece of it.
Since the launch of BBM in 2005, it has experienced ups and downs in terms of popularity. Even, in the market when Android and iPhone were flourishing, it was reported to be the number one messaging app in Indonesia in 2016. The same year, BBM announced it still had about 90 million active users across the world.
This shows BBM still had a few loyal users, but now BlackBerry Messenger officially will no longer exist after May 31st.
Let’s know more about it!
Why Did Emtek Decide To Call It Quits?
As per a blog post, Indonesia-based Emtek Group, the company who has been running BBM app since 2016, has announced that the messaging app will stop working from May 31st. Well, Emtek has been trying to revive the app for years. It tried to allure users by introducing features like Video calling and Uber hailing but to our dismay, it failed miserably.
In a blog post, the company wrote, “We are proud of what we have built to date … The technology industry, however, is very fluid, and in spite of our substantial efforts, users have moved on to other platforms, while new users proved difficult to sign on. Though we are sad to say goodbye, the time has come to sunset the BBM consumer service, and for us to move on.”
However, BBMe, the enterprise version of the app will continue to exist.
What Now?
If you are an avid BBM user, then you get the enterprise version on iOS and Android devices. However, you need to pay a subscription fee of $2.50 every six months.
BBMe (BBM Enterprise) comes with features such as edit messages, unsend messages, end-to-end encryption. You can also use BBMe on Mac and Windows computer as well.
With these features, it may certainly worth paying a few dollars, provided, you don’t want to let it go.
Well, BBM was certainly very popular in the pre-iPhone era and it was certainly a good run for the app. It is sad to see that the BBM app was not able to cope with the changing technology.
Being one of the first phone messenger apps, it has earned a good reputation. If only, it could have adopted the changes and features provided by the app now, who knows it could be one of the best.
It is still debatable, to what extent people would be affected by the BBM’s death. However, its death was inevitable. As app continued to lose users to new apps such as Facebook Messenger, iMessage(iOS), Whatsapp Messenger and more. Even the tricks applied were not able to save BBM, as the users switched to different platforms.
The physical keyboards, stickers, music, ephemeral messages, and BBMoji all of them would be certainly missed. With a heavy heart, let’s say Goodbye to BlackBerry Messenger.
Anyway, nothing lasts forever!
RIP BlackBerry!
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