BBM IS COMING TO ANDROID AND IOS

BBM has been one of the most appealing features of BlackBerry ecosystem since its launch and is considered the father of all the chatting applications (like WhatsApp, iMessage and Viber) that float around these days. It inspired these all and it still remains one of those features which makes people go for BlackBerry smartphones. But with the rising popularity of iOS and Android even the guys over at BlackBerry are starting to acknowledge the strength of these ecosystems and it looks like they have a decided to get a piece of the cake for themselves too. As it says in the heading, BBM is coming to Android and iOS.

BlackBerry CEO Thornstein Heins announced during BlackBerry Live 2013 conference that BBM will be available as a third-party app for both the ecosystems and it will be supported on all iOS devices that run at-least iOS 6.0 and all Android devices that run at-least Android 4.0 ICS.

The app will be live on Apple App Store and Google Play Store and will only support BBM chats, multi-person chats, voice note sharing and BlackBerry Groups (where users can share calendar, photos, files etc with a group) initially. But as Thornstein mentioned on stage, they plan to make BBM a full featured application on both the ecosystems equipped with all the latest BBM features such as voice call, video call, screen share and the recently announced Channels as well.

While BBM on iOS and Android may be very behind in the acceptance curve when WhatsApp and iMessage are put in the comparison with it but there is no doubt that BBM still has a certain level of appeal that these services are yet to match.