BBM coming to Windows Phone in July

There’s excellent news today if you’re one of the many owners with a Windows Phone device waiting for the arrival of the BlackBerry Messenger app for your platform. After the previous releases of BBM for Android and iOS, the BBM for Windows Phone release by the end of July has been confirmed.

As BlackBerry's phone sales and overall revenue continue to freefall, the company's push to reimagine itself as a cross-platform business software provider continues.

CEO John Chen provided a more concrete timeline for the instant messaging service's Windows Phone debut.

Many fans of the Windows Phone platform have been hoping for a BBM app arrival for some time, and at the end of February BlackBerry officially stated that the WP version was in the pipeline. In late March BlackBerry CEO John Chen then announced that the BBM Windows Phone app would appear in the company’s fiscal Q2, giving a time frame of between May and July.

Chen narrowed the launch window to the month of July, CrackBerry reports.

BBM, long limited to BlackBerry devices alone, was downloaded more than 10 million times in the first 24 hours it was available for Android and iOS, in October 2013. The app does what you'd expect, allowing users to shoot messages, files, and pictures back and forth, complete with indicators when an message has been read or is in the process of being responded to.

The addition is a boon to Windows Phone, which is reshaping itself into a capable business-focused mobile option while BlackBerry itself tumbles from grace. During this morning's earning call, Chen revealed that phone sales dropped from to 2.6 million devices, down from 3.4 million last quarter and 6.8 million a year ago. The company's still doing all it can to make BlackBerry itself an appealing platform for enterprises, however. Just this week, BlackBerry announced the "BBM Protected" encrypted messaging solution for its eBBM Suite, as well as plans to bring the full Amazon Appstore and its 200,000-plus Android apps to the upcoming BlackBerry 10.3 update.

A specific date has not been given, but at least we know that the app will arrive on the Windows Phone Store by the end of July, and of course it could always appear sooner than that.

It’s not yet known if the BBM Windows Phone app will offer all of the same functionality and features of the Android and iOS versions, but it won’t be too much longer until we find out, or what do you thing?

Let us know by sending your comments.