Blackberry has been in the news more in the last few days than it has been in almost a year. Between the company losing $1 billion in their second quarter of the 2014 fiscal year, and laying off 4000 or 40% of their workforce. Along with BBM not launching on time. Then today, the company being bought out for $4.7 billion, there’s been a lot to talk about with Blackberry…but not a lot of good stuff.
On Saturday, BBM for Android was delayed for a couple of reasons. One being that they were working with Google to eliminate the many fake BBM apps in the Play Store. Also the leaked version of BBM was causing problems that they are working on fixing now. Today, the Head of BBM, Andrew Bocking, took to the BBM Blog and posted the following update for BBM for Android and iOS:
Hi Android and iPhone users,
This is Andrew Bocking, head of BBM at BlackBerry. As a follow up to our first blog post on Saturday, I want to take a moment to provide you with an update on the rollout of BBM on Android and iPhone.
Last week, an unreleased, older version of the BBM for Android app was posted on numerous file sharing sites. We were aware of an issue with this unreleased version of the BBM for Android app. This older version resulted in volumes of data traffic orders of magnitude higher than normal for each active user and impacted the system in abnormal ways. The version we were planning to release on Saturday addressed these issues, however we could not block users of the unreleased version if we went ahead with the launch.
We attempted to address the problems caused by the unreleased version throughout the day on Saturday, but as active users of the unreleased app neared a million – and accelerated – it became clear that the only way to address the issue was to pause the rollout for both Android and iPhone.
The team is now focused on adjusting the system to completely block this unreleased version of the Android app when we go live with the official BBM for Android app. We are also making sure that the system is reinforced to handle this kind of scenario in the future. While this may sound like a simple task – it’s not. This will take some time and I do not anticipate launching this week.
Thank you for your patience while we take the time needed to deliver the experience you expect from BBM. We will continue to provide you with updates here on InsideBlackBerry.com and through @BBM on Twitter. We will notify everyone who has pre-registered on BBM.com when BBM is available on Android and iPhone.
Andrew Bocking
EVP, BBM
So no BBM this week. And we literally have no idea when it’s coming. Hopefully this doesn’t turn into the BB10 launch. That launch was delayed more times than I can count. How many of you are sad to see BBM getting delayed again?