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If you’re a current or past user of BBM, whether it be on Android since its release or on an old blackberry that you used to carry with you everywhere, you can’t deny that BBM was once a popular and universally accepted messaging platform that almost everyone was using. This is was mostly because Blackberry’s were the “IT” device at the time, but since Android and iOS arrived blackberry’s have obviously had a slow decline. Maybe in part because of their decreasing mobile presence, Blackberry the smart choice to bring their popular messaging platform over to other mobile OS’s. With so many popular messaging apps out there for Android already, it was hard to see users jumping ship back to BBM, however once it was released for a closed beta out to Android 4.0+ users, it actually saw a fairly large number of downloads. Of course this number could have grown quite a bit more if Blackberry had made BBM available to more than just users on ICS and up.
Starting sometime next month, Blackberry is going to be opening up the compatibility of BBM to work on devices that are still running on Android Gingerbread. It won’t work with all versions of Gingerbread, but more precisely it will work with any device that is said to be running on Android Gingerbread 2.3.3+. That cuts out anyone that is running on a version of Gingerbread before that build. This could and should be a good move for Blackberry and their BBM messaging app, as Android Gingerbread users on 2.3.3+ still make up a decent amount of the whole Android Platform. Actually, above 20%. With that many users still hanging around on an older version of the operating system, BBM is missing out on a large portion of potential downloads.
Until BBM is ready to go primetime with Gingerbread users, it will continue to work only with devices that are running Android 4.0+. We’re not sure that this fact will hurt anyones feelings, but if you are eagerly awaiting a better messaging experience than what’s currently available to you on a Gingerbread device, you won’t have to wait long before Blackberry has you covered. If you know someone who uses BBM on their Android device, do they like it and prefer to use it over other Android apps? Are you someone who personally uses BBM over other options likes Groupme, Whatsapp, or others?
Source: TheNextWeb