7 thoughts on “Blackberry Messenger for iOS and Android hits 5 million downloads in 8 hours”

1. Installed it.
   Got put on waiting list.
   Remembered none of my friends have BlackBerrys any more.
   Deleted app.

2. Yeah, there will probably be a lot of unused or deleted downloads.

3. Yeah, I should conduct an informal poll of the people I communicate with regularly. I don’t think very many of them are still on Blackberry.

4. I have three. Two brothers and my Mom, who gets the hand me down Blackberrys.

   The app is fast and does everything native BBM does, and I immediately deleted “Touch” after I installed BBM.

   I know it’s become de rigeur to mock Blackberry, but BBM is still the gold standard of messenger apps, and it’s puzzling to me why Apple has not moved to make iMessage a true messenger app in the same vein as BBM.

5. It’d be interesting to know what the OS breakdown was.

   And, yeah, as Mark pointed out, how many people who download it will ever send a single message with it.

   (I know a few Canadians who still have BB devices.

   I just use Facebook to talk to them; why in hell would I want to use BBM?)

6. For a non-BBM user, could you explain what “true messenger app” means here, and what iMessage lacks?

   (I mean, I use Beejive on the rare occasion I’m doing non-FB, non-SMS “messaging” on iOS, so I’m not attached to Apple’s tool.

   But what’s missing from it that a “true” app has?)

7. BBM has a high level interface that let’s you manage individual users and grouped conversations. It has lists, media and other attachment features built right into the interface for a group or an individual conversation. And it does this with a minimum of clutter. iMessage has no such group management, and even tho you can send a message and receive replies to and from a number of people, in your message lists it is not immediately distinguishable from other messages in your iMessage queue.