BBM Available for Android and iPhone | Hacker News Reader

BBM Available for Android and iPhone

blogs.blackberry.com

78 pointsrshlo103 comments

And at the same time as releasing this, they've just laid off 40% of the company. The tried and true PR tactic of trying to hide bad news: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732380820457908...

Alternative source for those who can't access WSJ: http://www.engadget.com/2013/09/18/wsj-blackberry-expected-t...

It's not working. I just heard about the job cuts on NPR, but I didn't hear anything about BlackBerry messenger app.

They also release a phablet phone amid all this nonsense.

The timing of all this is very, very odd.

I don't think that's bad news. But the markets disagreed and the price took a hit. It's been awesome to see the new management's discipline, should have cut earlier but they got the major planks laid out, new os, android run time, backend services, browser. Just refinements left. Employee count to revenue is getting good. 6 devices a year. Simple. And the new phone has the paratek antenna, this is going to be close.

And the new phone has the paratek antenna, this is going to be close

So the new antenna is what will save BlackBerry?

No fiscal discipline, and execution. Battery life on the new 5" phone is a couple days. Maybe the tunable radio helps. App gap is closing, unity ports, android, bloomberg is now on it. Maps suck. I don't know if they'll make it, aka survive, it is going to be close.

Edit,I don't know if the app gap is closing. But probably not.

BB is beyond fiscal discipline IMO.

It's pretty clear they'll be gutted and sold for parts at this point. They're trying to lose weight before the fashion show.

The capitalist acts of desperation to increase company profit... First motivate the employees to write the İOS and Android app, they will be working their asses off, hoping the company will survive. Then fire them. Voila!

Too little, too late. Whatsapp has taken the throne in multi-platform messaging quite some time ago. Just like Facebook and Google+, no matter how good and innovative the latter is, as long as all your friends are still on the former, the latter will not gain much traction.

No one in Australia uses Whatsapp, I have no idea how everyone else in the world communicates but everyone uses Skype or Facebook Chat to talk to each other here.

Also, everyone I know wouldn't pay for a communications protocol, no matter how good it is.

I live in Australia and use Whatsapp and so do lots of other people I know.

I'm not joking here, the only people I've seen use it are foreign exchange students, and I go to a university. I keep hearing how it's big, but then I don't see any real world use over here.

I also live in Australia and use Whatsapp all the time. Skype is way too heavyweight. Facebook ... I do not trust facebook at all, and do not wish to tie up my messaging capabilities with them.

> Also, everyone I know wouldn't pay for a communications protocol, no matter how good it is.

Dude, it's a dollar. One dollar. That's your contribution to the infrastructure that is handling 27 billion messages a day.

Was your phone free? Are your phone calls and SMS free? Is anything else in life free? I don't get it.

i believe wechat and line are both bigger.

It's distributed on a very per-country basis. WhatsApp is used by over 90% of people in Spain, to the detriment of others. It shows how the success of this kind of thing depends more on network effects than on product quality - only one of them is exactly homogeneous across countries.

I really like LINE better than Whatsapp.

Nobody uses LINE outside of East Asia.

The missing element is trust, particularly in the professional / business market. I wouldn't dream of suggesting Whatsapp to my professional contacts. But BBM I just might, especially if they are (or were in the past) already blackberry users, so probably have an identity there.

I don't use Whatsapp. It feels kind of anti-internet to me.

When your phone's battery dies, you can just keep checking your Whatsapp messages on your computer right? False.

Want to switch smartphone platforms, just log in to Whatsapp on your new phone and all your old messages (read: PHOTOS) are expectedly there, right? HAH.

Moved countries, and now I need to broadcast on my Facebook wall asking people to re-add me on Whatsapp? Because I got a new phone number? An app running on my supercomputer in my pocket with a retina display is still tied to a phone number? Are you fucking kidding me?

I use FB chat and Hangouts. I would use FB chat exclusively but it can't do video calls.

you can just keep checking your Whatsapp messages on your computer right? True I'm using bluestack software.I only checking whatsapp only office hour only.

There's a difference! Bluestack is a workaround.

Better situation would be at least a web app. An app that integrates Whatsapp with Windows and Macs (like iMessages work on Macs) will be a great idea.

Does it do syncing?

That is, while you're having a conversation on Bluestack on your computer and then you don't get a reply for a while, and when you get a reply on your phone, you completely forget what the conversation was about: will your phone show a history of the conversation from the computer?

I agree with you on this one.

I have no idea how every company running after messaging just forgets that we use computers! Almost every messenger app out there doesn't work on desktops. A simple web app will do, but no!

iMessages are quite close to what messaging should be. They work on your (Apple) desktop, phone and tablet and sync quite well. Too bad they're only for Apple Ecosystem!

Distributed systems with distributed, synchronized state is a hard problem. Whatsapp handles 27 billion messages per day. That's almost 50x Twitter's volume. The former behaves like a switch with pretty end-points (the smartphone app), whereas the latter is a massive distributed system storing enormous amounts of state.

If Whatsapp allowed you to log-in from multiple places but didn't synchronize your state for you (i.e., see conversation history that you had on your phone after you've moved to your computer) it would be a pretty unpleasant experience. To accomplish that, the switch-like back end wouldn't be sufficient.

I'm not sure what Google Talk's traffic is compared to Whatsapp, but gtalk allows simultaneous logins across many devices and does a decent job of synchronizing messages across them -- phone, tablet, computer (though there is a slight delay depending on the volume of messages it needs to sync).

I seriously doubt Google Talk (now called Hangouts) has anywhere close to Whatsapp's traffic. But even if they did, Google can support simultaneous login with synchronized state (and server-stored state) because it's solved a lot of these big problems in the past for other products with hundreds/thousands of engineers.

One of the big things though is that BBM is big over here in Indonesia and is the main selling point for Blackberry. It seems odd, but blackberries are consumer smartphones over here. This could go one of two ways:

1. BBM could become a larger service that Blackberry finds some other way to leverage, or

2. This could lead to the loss of the last few really major captive markets for BBM.

I don't think that Blackberry can survive withotu finding a way to leverage BBM in these markets.

I can't say about WhatsApp in other countries but their usage is going to take a hit in India once they start charging(they plan to charge $0.99 per year, that is ~INR 60), people will flock.

Reasons: 1. People in India are too used to "free" software. Only legal software most purchase here is Windows that comes bundled with laptops/desktops. 2. Low credit card penetration. Most of the teens don't have credit cards. Thanks to government rules, we can't use debit cards to pay on App Stores as well.

So people either won't pay or can't pay. Many are already starting to use other apps and there is no shortage of free apps due to exploding messaging space.

The only reason it's free is so WhatsApp can make money at some point. If there are people who won't pay, ever, then there's less reason to keep them as users.

Not "no reason", however. I'm sure WhatsApp could find a way to monetise them, or just leverage them for network effect. WhatsApp is a lightweight replacement for text messages, not a full-blown social network. You pay a buck, you get free text messages, not unending trickery to overcome your privacy options. I have WhatsApp contacts worldwide, so even if some countries reduce their usage there's benefit in sticking with it. For $100 I'd stop using it. For $10, I'd think about it. $1 is a no-brainer, and I live in Africa.

Now I just wish they had a supported, paid-for API I could integrate with.

Anonymity is still important to some though, since whatsapp by default uses phone number vs bbm's pin number, some users may shift to bbm. It is late, but may be not too late.

whats app has a huge privacy & security issue and their user are realizing it now so i hope BBM become their next choice .... it would be great if someone introduces true encryption though :)

Why would an Android or iPhone user install BBM? I don't get the value proposition here. I'm not being disingenuous.

I'm wondering the same thing. iMessage offers all of what they are stating as features.

But, I have never really used a Blackberry device before.

Additionally, I wonder if releasing this sooner would've saved them or changed history a little...

I have owned a blackberry for years, used intensively. If they had done this way earlier, it could have saved them a bit. However, I think what they would have had to do is the other way around: a iMessage app on a blackberry. Obviously wasn't going to happen either.

I think the fact that they are releasing it now is an admission of defeat. I know a few people that kept their blackberry as long as they did only because of BBM, so I can understand them not releasing it sooner, but I agree, a couple of years ago you might have convinced someone that blackberry was a good platform because they liked the bbm service on the iphone. A long shot maybe, but at least a shot.

EXCEPT iMessage isn't Crossplatform.

I'd install iMessage on my nexus 4 if it was a drop-in replacement for my SMS client and was a solid, Apple-quality app.

Message Protocol X: supports chat, runs on iOS

Message Protocol Y: supports chat, runs on iOS, Android, Blackberry.

I absolutely love iMessage, but I hate that I can't use it with anyone who owns android.

blackberry phones are much cheaper than iphones, thats the market

So that you can communicate for free with other Blackberry users. I do not have unlimited SMS, so avoiding the racket that is pay-per-message is desirable in any form.

Anecdotal perhaps, but I know no-one who uses a Blackberry. 5 years a go, dozens of people I know used one, but nowadays? None.

Anecdotal definitely. Cell phone markets change lots depending on country, and no one has lived everywhere. As someone upthread said, they are used a lot by kids in the UK, for example.

FWIW, in my social circle and outer circles phone ownership is probably 70% android, 10% windows, 5% apple and 15% dumb phone, so yeah, different strokes for different folks.

Where in the world do you live that Windows Phone beats iPhone? I work for Microsoft and still know way more people with iPhones.

if you really work for Microsoft, you would perhaps have known that there are certain countries where Windows phone outsell the Iphone because there are no carrier subsidies and the Iphone is freaking expensive!

Buying an Iphone for $99 because it is subsidized[0] is a 1 percenter solution in global terms.

[0]I use the word even though I doubt it is the right word since it's more like purchased on credit actually because you're going to pay for it over your contract period hence that isn't how subsidy should be used

Blackberry is still dominant in certain niches. The combination of the: low cost, physical keyboard and messaging makes it popular for youths to communicate unnoticed. It's also well suited for enterprise.

Anecdotally, my sister (just graduated college) and my uncle (an investor in Palo Alto) both use blackberries. Perhaps your peer group encourages conformity to within-group phone norms? :p

In seriousness, I think it's very likely that my sister has one specifically because my uncle does; it's very easy for one community to learn to do things one way and another to learn another way.

> Perhaps your peer group encourages conformity to within-group phone norms? :p

I’m sure that happens, but I’m surrounded by strong-willed individuals who don’t give a rodent’s behind about what choices I make in mobile platforms. Most people I know use Android. About 30% of the people I know use iOS, but I doubt I had anything to do with their choice for the platform.

I also didn’t say that Blackberry isn’t a fine platform, or that it isn’t used anywhere at all. However, in my group of friends, family and a few hundred acquaintances, I haven’t spotted a Blackberry device in the past year.

There are some social groups in which everyone uses BBM as the de facto messaging service. Some carriers offer plans with unlimited BBM messaging but limited (or expensive) data and/or SMS. Additionally, peer pressure and indifference to change may be a factor (if all the cool people you know are using BBM, why should anyone switch?)

Because they have not yet discovered Facebook chat. Or WhatsApp. Or Skype.

Here all the kids on the buses have blackberries, the London riots were run over BBM. http://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/aug/08/london-riots-fa...

It is weird how a business phone caught on just because of BBM.

Text Messages / SMS cost a LOT outside of the US. With very few offering decent text packages.

Everyone I met in Mexico City used Whatsapp. I suspect BBM caught on in England for the same reason.

The London riots? Of 2011?

They should have release BBM for iPhone and Android 2 years ago.

Extrapolote that thought; it's only now that those kids (who grew up with BBM) are in charge of their own financial destinty. They might be used to having BBM in their lives and if they can get it on a new "cool" phone then that will make it popular. (To an extent.)

That was two years ago, is that still the case?

It's the same for every messaging solution. Here, locally, it's WhatsApp right now that is even more annoying and therefor worse than Facebook (the number 2).

Depending on your social graph, the 'What? You're not on <insertServiceHere>?' question is what drives a large number of people to use otherwise utterly crappy services (Hey, WhatsApp!). BBM seems to be another niche here.

I'm really intrigued why whatsapp is more annoying than facebook?

There is no system of adverts or selling data to it, since they actually charge for usage. I paid after 1 year free about 6 months ago.

I have pretty much every real life friend I care about on there, individually and numerous private groups. We regularly share photos, text, video, locations, etc. privately (as far as we are aware). To me it perfectly fits the box of exactly what a social network should be.

It just works... This is why i'm so intrigued why you dislike it?

The need to appear intellectual by disliking popular things is strong in this forum.

Really? That's what you think if someone disagrees? Is your comment another version of the same 'trend' you see, trying to appear intellectual by assuming that other people just 'hate' for no reason?

Doesn't whatsapp have infamously bad security, despite its popularity?

http://fileperms.org/whatsapp-is-broken-really-broken/ http://samgranger.com/whatsapp-is-using-imei-numbers-as-pass...

That certainly used to be the case. I believe they now actually perform proper authentication - i.e. send an SMS with unique code to the handset, which gets automatically read and then authorizes the device.

Their security did used to be horrendous though, e.g. everything sent over all networks/http in plain text.

Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong though.

What I dislike, ordered from 'insane' to 'bad':

- Notifications for 'last active' / 'seen': Really? In what _world_ would that be a good idea? FB does the same crap, but I don't have any FB app and there's no global 'Yeah, that dude just looked at totally different things, but really: He's active and _should_ have answered you'.

- Not open. I don't trust them a bit. FB messages are XMPP and FB is "You're stupid to share things here anyway" by default. Whatsapp .. has no benefit, all the downsides.

- Free for a year, pay after everyone uses it. Bait and switch.

On top of that:

For me a social network is something entirely different. Whatsapp is a message application. It's Trillian or whatever, nothing of value. You can do the same thing via XMPP or Mail or .. any transport you like. It feels like someone is rebranding something boring, old, uninteresting, adds tiny crappy features (and a UI I cannot stand) on top and .. asks for money.

(No offense intended. I wouldn't want to take that thing from any user, even if I could. I just hate being 'invited', because it's not even remotely interesting for me. And I'm sorry that this 'wins', while open solutions are equal or superior..)

BBM is hugely popular in emerging markets, especially in Africa for instance.

For me, Facebook Messenger doesn't fit my needs. It's terrible on BB10 since they put 0 effort into making it for that platform. On Android, I agree, it's great. Likely the same for iOS.

Whatsapp is the closest in terms of achieving true cross-platform usability. It's a great client on BB10, and on Android. That said, I rarely use it since most of my messaging is done via BBM or Facebook. The user engagement just seems to be higher on those platform.

@gehr (Gary Klassen, inventor of BBM) really put it best when he said (paraphrasing) that in general, social networks fit various needs: Twitter - I want to talk to many people at large. LinkedIn - I want to talk to colleagues and business partners. Facebook - I want to talk to my extended friends and family network. BBM - I want to talk to people I really care about.

And that's exactly how it's been for me for the last several years. My BBM contact list is limited to a few key people that I generally talk to or interact with in some capacity. I say and share things on there that I wouldn't anywhere else.

In addition, the new BBM features they've added in BB10, like BBM Voice, BBM Video, and Screen Sharing are pretty freakin fantastic. I use those features daily, and I think it'll be great when it comes to the other platforms. An interesting use case that I've found for Screen Sharing is being able to have users demonstrate issues or bugs they're seeing in my apps.

In any case, there's definitely a place for BBM here. I'll be encouraging a lot of my friends to grab it. Maybe even my parents, though I'm not sure I want to keep getting messages from them, LOL.

BBM doesn't seem like much of a win but a blackberry email client would be smart. As far as I know they're the only ones that have an efficient mobile email client that does things like not download a huge file just to upload it again when you forward a message with an attached document. That's the only reason I've heard for people keeping Blackberrys instead of switching to iPhones or Androids.

Really? That's a reason for staying with Blackberry? Curious who/what these users are. Is there some case where users are primarily dealing with email on a mobile device AND forwarding around lots of attachments? I'll admit, I like that idea, but not enough to stick with an (IMO) highly antiquated platform just to get better attachment forwarding.

Well, these days the reasons for staying with Blackberry are getting slimmer and slimmer. In corporate situations forwarding around documents in emails does tend to be a pretty big use case. We really need "pass by reference" in emails but no one has really cracked the "dropbox for enterprises" use case. Nomadesk is supposed to be that and so far seems pretty buggy (the "lose your files" kind of buggy). Maybe the aerofs guys will fix that.

They recently released this for the corporate side of things. "Secure Workspace" is a self contained BB-based email app, which connects to the BES stuff on the back end. Looks very nice from a corporate security point of view.

But I'm not sure how good it is if you're looking for a "Blackberry UI". Anecdotally that seems to be as much about the old (non-touch) BB devices and their physical keyboards.

That sounds awesome. I need to check with corporate IT to see if they'll provision that with the BYOD Android program.

I personally know a lot of people that stay on BlackBerry just for BBM. I hope I'm wrong, but this may be very bad for the BlackBerry platform.

Or the opposite. Do you retain more people through fear and lock in, or do you gain more by being open and transparent?

When one of your last advantages is from lock-in, giving up that lock-in seems… risky, at the very least.

Edit: Not that hanging onto it would help them either.

I used to be one. But then so many people were using Whatsapp I started using that. Fewer and fewer people were using BBM. Even fewer still were the number of people who used BBM exclusively. Now I don't think I'll miss BBM at all and as a result I'm looking to Android for my next phone.

Going to have to sell my Lumia 820 quick!

Sarcasm aside, BBM in the UK is relegated to children at school. I imagine it's pretty much the same across the rest of Europe at least. SMS is pretty much free here so we just use that or email.

As a result of this, I don't get why this is touted as a super-important move for RIM/BlackBerry/Whatever they are called now.

I think it's mostly that it was one of the first free, popular messaging services, at a time when text messages in the US were a lot more expensive. I have never used it myself, so I can't say for sure. It does seem fairly irrelevant in the modern day and age.

Why is it irrelevant? Messaging apps like WhatsApp, KaoKaoTalk, and Viber are hugely popular.

Maybe I spoke incautiously. I should have said, "Less relevant." And although I understand these other apps have big user-bases, none of them have anything like the penetration of unlimited SMS, if I had to guess.

When you have a family plan with multiple lines, even the first level block text messaging plans add up quickly. (I'm on Verizon in the USA).

I feel the whole text message surcharge system is just a racket, so any way I can beat that is fine by me.

It's pretty much the only service anyone who owned (owns?) a Blackberry ever raved about. Yes, they had easy-to-use email before anyone else did. But BBM really was a great chat service, and it was way ahead of its time.

I'm not sure how it stands up against the competition now, as I haven't owned a Blackberry in many years. But it was a really solid service back in the day, and I think a lot of people out there still love it.

I doubt this saves Blackberry/RIM/the_artist_formerly_known_as_RIM from extinction, but it's an interesting move.

If I could point out the one big reason that BBM was very popular at one point was because of the little "D" and "R" on outgoing messages. "D" meant delivered and "R" meant read. That, along with the reliability and performance of the messaging service and the fact that you didn't have to have to pay for a messaging plan to send messages/images/video, made it really great. I know Google Hangouts now has the "read" feature, and I believe iMessage does as well, but WhatsApp does not.

Beyond that, it just had a very intuitive UI and just worked as you expected it to. They steadily added new features like groups, voice and video calling which increased its value over time, but unfortunately, the user base got crushed.

I'm looking forward to trying it out on my N4 ... my wife uses a blackberry Z10, so I have at least one person to use it with.

In WhastApp, there are two little checkboxes next to every message -- one indicates the message has been received by the server (which is actually very useful!), two indicates the message has been delivered to the client. Coupled with the "Last seen at <this-time>" indicator for each chat partner, it's a decent heuristic for read messages.

As far as I know, on whatsapp, one checkmark on a message means delivered, two means read. It depends on the device of the recipient though. Works best with iOS and Android devices in my experience.

That's not correct actually. The second checkmark means its been delivered to the device, not necessarily read.

When I was in a long-distance relationship a couple of years ago and couldn't SMS internationally without re-mortgaging, we made heavy use of an Android app called Kik which also had this very useful feature. It had four indicators, if I remember correctly. "..." meant it was pending and you were having network/signal issues, "S" meant the Kik server had received it from your network, and the "D" and "R" were delivered and read.

I didn't know Google Hangouts had it. How does it display the read indicator? I find the interface a little... obtuse, to say the least!

Bundled SMS are usually only "free" within the home country. International SMS get expensive fast, even with the new European rules on pricing. WhatsApp and presumably BBM, etc are great for people with contacts abroad / Travellers with a local data plan (although WhatsApp gets complicated with all the different numbers, so travellers will likely benefit the most).

When we were building the Groups feature of BBM back in 2009, a core feature of the new transport layer was device-to-device message encryption. I wonder if that's still a part of BBM, or if it's been stripped out since then... If messages are still encrypted, I'd install the new app on my Android phone just for that feature.

Don't they got removed after India government complained it was too hard to hack? I remember they even threatened them with ban BBM on India.

I don't know. I left RIM before that all unfolded. From what I recall, the Indian government was appeased by RIM offering to install a Relay in India, and giving the Indian government access to it.

However, even having access to the Relay shouldn't compromise the integrity of encrypted BBM because it used peer-to-peer public/private key crypto. When you added a new contact, the devices would perform a handshake and exchange public keys, so even the Relay shouldn't be able to see cleartext BBM. This was a feature baked into the BBM app itself, built on top of the PIN message system, and separate from the encryption used in a BES environment.

So did they shut off BBM encryption for the whole world? I wish I knew.

I really wish there was a defined API for "messaging service backend" that iOS/Android understood. (XMPP? IRC?) iMessage can intelligently switch between Apple's own backend and SMS depending on data connection and presence information; why can't I tell it about a contact's Facebook profile, or Twitter username, or BBM address, or WhatsApp username, etc., and have it transport the messages over whichever one looks to be most recently active?

Windows phone does this with its in built "Me" app. Its quite neat, but consumes tons of data due to the constant syncing.

> Message can intelligently switch between Apple's own backend and SMS depending on data connection and presence information

I'm not familiar with the Apple implementation, but something similar was implemented by the Yahoo Messenger client app running on my Windows Mobile several years back, seamlessly switching from Internet data connection to SMS -- resulting in an SMS for every single outbound message and a bill of around $300 from AT&T for all those "OK" and "Sure" messages.

Fortunately for those of us without SMS plans, iMessage lets you turn off the SMS fallback, and displays a clear visual distinction when it gets used.

I think this is a smart move. When BB was on top, letting other devices on to their messaging platform would have been a mistake (which is, incidentally why iMessage is single-platform). Now that they're trailing hard in market share, making BBM cross platform means blackberry users are less isolated.

They have had to switch strategies, but that they are actively adapting to their new reality is a good sign. They should have done this a year ago at least.

Waiting so long means they now have severely diminished marketshare when it comes to hardware, and thusly, Android/iPhone users have no reason to pick it up. Maybe if they released this 4 years ago, people would use it and at least BlackBerry would still be relevant in the messenger space. Instead, now they get to compete with Kik, WhatsApp, and a myriad of other cross-platform messaging apps.

Employees of BB-centric companies may be happy, though.

Great, another phone messenger that I can't use on my computer. Convergence is definitely the future!

By reading this, I understand why BlackBerry is still way behind. BBM was cool maybe 6 years ago, so what is breaking about this? Facebook Messenger can do the same as BBM, and a lot more. What's the point of installing this app?

So you can discover which of your friends are still on BBM, and get them to switch over to iMessage/whatsapp/facebook message ;)

I had a BB 9800 and a BB 9900 before, and switched to Android phones for couples of years. From my own experience, BBM is still the most stable and comfortable IM app on mobile phones.

I still miss the feeling about using BBM. I guess the backend service part of RIM/Blackberry is still somehow ahead of other manufacturers.

What's the catch? There's always something that winds up costing end users either money or data. What will it be with these BBM ports?

If there's really no gothca lurking in the darkness then I'm all for it!

I'd wager the odds of Blackberry Android handsets in the next year just went to overwhelming, I doubt they will get one out before xmas though.

Like with Blackberry 10 they are too late.

Surprising that they are not supporting pre-Ice Cream Sandwich Android devices.

It's a shame Apple won't release iMessage for Android

Where is the desktop/web version!

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