BlackBerry shuts down messenger citing competitors as cause

BBM, or BlackBerry Messenger, the encrypted messaging carrier that added many to the joys of cellular chat – and changed into blamed for the 2011 London riots – is ultimately shutting down on Friday.

The Indonesian company that owns the service, announced its plans in April, giving users a month to migrate.

The company, Emtek, pointed out in a blogpost that: "we're proud of what we have developed to this point. The technology trade, although, is awfully fluid, and despite our sizeable efforts, users have moved on to other structures, while new clients proved complex to signal on."

at first exclusive to BlackBerry telephones, the pocket emailers made with the aid of Canadian enterprise RIM, BBM's excessive aspect came in 2009, because the handset range multiplied from a company-concentrated product to the client market.

with the aid of specializing in physical keyboards and reasonably priced instruments, BlackBerry in the beginning held its own towards starting to be competitors from Apple's iPhone and other smartphones powered by Google's Android working equipment. under five years after the iPhone changed into launched, besides the fact that children, BlackBerry gave in to the inevitable, releasing BBM for iOS and Android in the summertime of 2013. BlackBerry left the mobilephone business in 2016.

The London riots in 2011 led to a burst of public consideration for the carrier, after the Metropolitan police cited that the encrypted nature of the messages intended they could not eavesdrop on communications, as they could with older SMS texts, and because BBM made it an awful lot easier to send one-to-many announces than most telephones at the time.

One BBM broadcast despatched at the peak of the riots, known as on "every person from either side of London" to vandalise stores on Oxford highway.

by the requisites of 2019, BBM was comparatively weakly blanketed, youngsters. the place modern chat apps comparable to iMessage and WhatsApp are end-to-conclusion encrypted, which means most effective the recipient can decrypt the message, BBM traditionally used a sort of encryption that ensured that BlackBerry itself might all the time decrypt messages if required. This led the company into fights with legislation enforcement organizations, which wanted access to that potential.

besides the fact that children the consumer edition of BBM is shutting down, a unique version of BBM, geared toward massive agencies, still exists: BBM enterprise is made through BlackBerry itself. because April, ordinary clients were in a position to download it from the iOS and Android App retailers. The service is free for the first year, after which $2.49 (£1.98) every six months thereafter.