Smartphone maker Blackberry is ending its messenger service, BBM, on May 31. The company was the first to have an exclusive messaging service, which would only work when messages were sent from one Blackberry device to another.
Emtek, the company that took over Blackberry in 2016, announced the development in a blog post. "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," the company wrote in its post.
BBM was the first ever exclusive instant messaging app, where users with Blackberry smartphones could text and share documents. However, as technology advanced, most users shifted to other apps such as WhatsApp, among others. BBM's popularity came down after messaging services like WhatsApp became available on all devices.
Apart from the upgrade in technology and the wide range in choices for free instant messaging apps, Blackberry did not have concrete monetisation plans for BBM. There had been talks earlier for it to be available on iOS and Android, but by then, Apple had come out with iMessage and Android had Google Hangouts.
Blackberry later came out with BBMe, a for-pay enterprise version which is available on all phones. The enterprise app comes with a subscription fee of $2.50 for every six months. BBMe will still be available on iOS and Android for free download. This version will now be available for personal use.
BBMe offers end-to-end encryption, message editing, unsending of messages, the services that the consumer version did not have.
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