BBM, or Blackberry Messenger has officially launched, beginning today. So now you can chat with your favorite Blackberry users, if they hadn’t already jumped ship. But BBM isn’t just about talking to Blackberry users. BBM is aiming to be your go-to messaging platform. Especially since they are now available on iOS, Android and Blackberry of course.
For those of us that are early adopters, we noticed that there is a persistent notification. If you’re like me, you probably hate persistent notifications. I hated it when Verizon had the persistent WiFi notification on every phone (luckily that’s gone now), and I hate that BBM has one. However, you can turn it off, fortunately. Just go into settings and it’s under the notifications section. But before you do that, read the rest of this article.
You may want to leave it persistent if you want to use BBM. In Android 4.3, Google has begun fighting apps that suck down battery and stay alive without you knowing. It now requires any app that wants to run in the background to place a persistent icon in your notification. Hence the BBM icon. Doing this allows that particular app to never be closed. Even when you’re running out of RAM. Why is closing it a bad thing? Well when you close it, you’re basically logging off of BBM. Meaning, you will no longer get messages from your contacts until you open it back up again. Pretty much because BBM doesn’t use Google Cloud Messaging to send out notifications. So the app needs to stay awake.
So no, the BBM app won’t be getting a “fix” to get rid of the persistent notification. Mostly due to the fact that Blackberry Messenger is pretty much never going to use Google Cloud Messaging or GCM. SO if you want to use BBM, you’re going to have to learn to live with that persistent notification. I know it sucks, but that’s life.