BBM for Android and iPhone Won’t Launch This Week

BBM has created a lot of hype since its announcement to privatize. Beforehand, the company announced that BBM for Android and iOS would hit the respective App Stores over the weekend — which didn’t happen because the leaked APK went online a day before the official launch and was downloaded by over a million people. This affected the servers in an abnormal way and as a result, the company decided to delay the launch of the application.
The company has also confirmed that they are working around the clock to release the application for Android and iOS, especially after the overwhelming response that the leaked APK received. Now, in a recent update, head of BBM at Blackberry Andre Bocking addressed the users in a blog post, with all the same reasons.

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.

Bocking did confirm one thing which most of us didn’t want to hear; that is, the application will not launch this week. We waited for such a long time, so waiting a bit more time shouldn’t be a problem, right? Anyway, we’ll let you know if we hear anything about the launch of the much-anticipated BBM for Android and iPhone.