Don't wait up for BBM on iPhone, Android – BlackBerry

Having botched the widespread release of its crown jewels, BBM, BlackBerry has now warned of a further delay to the Android and iOS versions of the messaging app. The messaging app was exclusively available on RIM/BlackBerry devices, but back in May the company promised to make BBM cross-platform and release versions for …

[chams]

"Usage of WhatsApp, which is a poor imitation of BBM, but which doesn't require a BlackBerry device"

Umm sorry, what? WhatsApp is not a poor imitation of BBM, it's the next generation of BBM. BBM would be lucky to have half the usage and features of WhatsApp.

[The True Prodigy]

Are you kidding me.....

BBM still offers package of features that others can't match: secure delivery, read receipts, ad hoc group creation, voice and video calls and even screen sharing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Are you kidding me.....

Pretty sure Google Hangouts/GTalk offers all these features, and it's truly cross platform.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Are you kidding me.....

With the added benefit of sharing all your corporate plans with Google, and all their advertisers, and the NSA, and all their freinds.

[James 51]

Re: Paranoid explanation

If it was a leak of an earlier version, the bug may well have been spotted and fixed in a later version.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Paranoid explanation

I realise that's the case, but it seems a remarkably big bug to have so close to release. And somebody had to leak it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Paranoid explanation

Yes, and indeed according to the discussions I've read it was, however the old buggy beta was causing "orders of magnitude" greater data traffic to the BBM servers which meant that Blackberry couldn't cope with the rapidly ramping numbers of users with this problem. If you think about it, 'orders' of magnitude implies a minimum factor of 100, so 1.1 million downloads could produce at least 110 million users worth of traffic. The new servers (it appears that Blackberry BBM is separated from iOS/Android) had never seen this sort of load and were overwhelmed.

I find this pretty sad, but it's not unexpected for Blackberry to have screwed this up. I suspect that at the current rate the bad news is going to keep coming as networks drop their products and their app world offerings stay outdated and threadbare. We have one Z10 user within the family, it's a nice phone, it works well and is really smooth to use, but without the 'ecosystem' surrounding it then it will almost certainly die before the improved BBOS and apps appear in full.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Paranoid explanation

Message to engineering staff:

Half of you are fired, the other half will be redundant in a month when the lawyers take over.

Now we need you to all concentrate on getting this revolutionary new bit of complex enterprise software out of the door.

Now CEOs will be going on a retreat to Hawaii to find out why employee moral is low.

[Nigel Brown]

If you look, you can see a boat being missed

Surely everyone uses WhatsApp now dont they? Does BBM offer anything that WA doesn't do?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: If you look, you can see a boat being missed

I was wondering the same thing. I've never used BBM so genuinely don't know what extras it might offer - anybody care to enlighten me? WhatsApp does pretty much everything I need - all the features in the main article with the possible exception of "secure messaging" seem to be covered in WA these days (even on my WinPhone version, I was delighted to find), and since I don't tend to send bank details, passwords, national security secrets or intimate snaps over it (honest, guv!) I'm not overly worried about the security aspect.

[Dan 55]

Re: If you look, you can see a boat being missed

To answer that question we read the article...

BBM still offers package of features that others can't match: secure delivery, read receipts, ad hoc group creation, voice calls and even screen sharing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: If you look, you can see a boat being missed

Apparently about 300 M people use whatsapp - hardly everyone. The simple point is that using whatsapp gives your telephone number out to people. You may not want to do that. It's why you have to be careful when sending text messages. Not everybody wants to be phoned up by drunks at three o'clock in the morning, or find they have accidentally given their phone number of a phishing site who sell it to cold callers.

BBM on the other hand uses a completely different primary key, and you can block people you don't want to hear from any more.

[Captain Scarlet]

Money

Maybe they realised its costs money to run as I fail to see how they can make money from it (BB10 user here before you call me an Androist or iFadist!)

[Oli 1]

never used it as i have never and will never own a bb handset, but from what ive heard BBM has real advantages over whatsapp, but they are mostly for corporate sectors. i mean i cant see why consumers would need centrally managed groups or distribution groups. i could be wrong as like i said ive never used it, but i guess the majority of whatsapp users have never used it either.

i will give it a try if it ever makes it out the stable for android as a curiosity but as per whatsapp will only use it if demanded to by a friend.

On a side note, since i couldnt replace my nokia n95 with another nokia and was forced to go touchscreen keyboard, i hate texting. a phone call is so much easier and quicker for me. i find the whole thing a bit insane, i have standard sms for talking with my parents, whatsapp for one group of friend and gtalk for another . ridiculous.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm guess you don't have a phone with a swype keyboard?

Apple and Microsoft's reluctance to offer a decent keyboard is what will keep me off those platforms.

[Anonymous Coward]

@Oli 1

My n95 was the last Nokia I ever bought. It was in fact the very reason it was the last one.

I actually prefer the latest windows nokias to that old piece of crap, but still don't fancy owning one.

[James 51]

Had an n95 8gb. Slightly bigger screen but slight smaller keyboard (when held up and compared to my borther's n95). That was a great handset. Only gave it up to part pay for a n900.

[Anonymous Coward]

@Oli 1

So you want a phone with a keyboard but would never buy a BB.

That's one of BlackBerry's problems, right there. You've never used it but you know you wouldn't buy it.

When Aristotle defined man as "the rational animal", he was surely joking.

[spaxe]

Re: @Oli 1

Even if I wanted to give a try to all types of phones (test one BB, one WinPho, one iPhone and two or three different Android based phones) I just don't have the €2000 (or the time to be honest) required for the test... so yes, my choice must be conditioned by press reviews and peer pressure... sad, but logical...

[cjpatten]

Re: @Oli 1

Doesn't every company allow you to trial a phone if you sign up to their user forums on fb etc? If BB aren't offering this its another example of how inept they are.

[Anonymous Coward]

The new battleground it seems

Given the recent non-news of some obscure Google Talk bug.

Blackberry are living in 2010 still. The world has moved on from BBM and now uses Google Hangouts. Keep up....

[technohead95]

no such thing as a read receipt

There's no such thing as a read receipt. How can you tell that a user has read something. Even if the receipt was generated when the user explicitly clicked on a button saying "I have read this", there's no way to tell the user isn't lying. All an application can provide is a delivery receipt and a "the user has opened this message" receipt.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: no such thing as a read receipt

Maybe a use for the Galaxy S4 eye tracking gizmo.....

It could check the users eyes actually 'scan' across the screen the correct number of times (no. of lines in the message).

They you could have a "almost certainly read this" receipt and a "started to read it but gave up half way through" receipt...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: no such thing as a read receipt

This is, you might say, technically correct. After all, we all know people who, even after having looked at something on the screen and read it, probably reading the words out loud as they did so, cannot recollect what it was about a moment later (they are usually to be identified in larger organisations by their expensive suits).

However, a "the user has opened this message receipt" lacks a certain snappiness, and the truth is that we know what "read receipt" means; it means that the application notifies the server and the sender when the message has actually become visible on screen, not just when the server fired it off hopefully into the TCP/IP black hole.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: no such thing as a read receipt

Yes there is I've used BBM for years when the message gets delivered there is a "D" and when the person opens the message the moment they open it there is a "R" that comes next to the message you sent to them so you will know they opened the message to read it.

[handleRV]

Cheating

I am one of those 300M users but I don't use it. How can I unregister? Why I have to wait one year?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Cheating

You don't, you go into account settings and delete your account.

[handleRV]

I am one of n 300M users but I don't use it. How can I unregister? Why do I have to wait one year?

[PipV]

To quote an advertisement for an American beer

'WhatsAapppppppppp?'

[CmdrX3]

Blackberry

The Keystone Cops of the mobile world.

[Dodel]

Surely all it would need is a plugin for Whatsapp+ / Viber / Bria, them type of apps to add the same functionality that BBM currently offers.

I really don't see a future for BBM given the alternatives.

[bigtimehustler]

Errrm, why on earth is it so hard to block the older version? It will be calling API services on specific URL's. All they need to do is change the URL's in the new version and release it, then firewall off all the old URL's.

How on earth can it take such a company so long to sort out an issue that is so simple!

[Dan 55]

I'd have thought it'd have been even simpler - BBM should have first opened a session with the server identifying itself (platform, version, etc...) and the server should then tell it where to go. Otherwise it's impossible to deny access to buggy releases, as we've seen here.

[Anonymous Coward]

BBM doesn't do that, it''s based on a very old protocol that has no provision for versions or indeed server handshakes AFAICS. There is nowhere to trap broken clients because they cannot recognise them.

[Dan 55]

So the first thing new BBM clients should do is send to an invalid destination PIN (e.g. 0) with a plain-text message as the command (in this case, something that passes the version and platform). And we stick another if statement server-side checking for messages to destination 0 with a plain-text message which tells the new clients that it can go ahead, is denied access until it's updated, it just sent an invalid command, etc...

Maybe I should patent this idea seeing as it seems like rocket science to the talent that RIM have got left.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because that's not how it works, BBM is based on Blackberry's old PIN messaging and from the reverse engineering descriptions I've seen it appears that there is no version information or build ID in the headers, simply source and destination PIN and the data. Hence their problem, the only way I can think of to block the rogue version is to create a new server with a different hostname/IP address and change the address the to-be-released clients talk to.

Blackberry could have re-designed the protocol for iOS/Android but I expect that the guys coding it were not given enough time to do this so they were forced to replicate their old design and cross their fingers. That didn't work.

[asdf]

Fail

I am sure by announcing your company is no longer basically viable and that nearly half of your workforce is going to get laid off you are going to have very motivated engineers willing to work massive overtime to make this right. There are good Canadian companies but not so much in the telecom industry (RIM lasted longer than Nortel at least).

[incognito56]

This isn't about what BBM hs against what Whatsapp doesn't. It's about what Whatsapp don't have yet doing a great job for millions of happt users, and what BBM has but cannot perform. RIM isn't just pulling disaster from the jaws of success. They are pulling the whole jaw.

[Anonymous Coward]

Blame Canada...

[asdf]

Why?

Nah just the customer is voting with their wallet. Most people don't know or could give a crap where BB is located.

[Badvok]

Summer came and went?

Minor point and I know it is always debatable when the seasons actually change, depending on whether you are a meteorologist or not, but so far as I can see they did have something to release on the last day of summer. Unfortunately they weren't able to, so yes NOW they have missed a summer release.

[Al_21]

Wait for BBM?

Don't worry, I don't know anyone who is waiting for this anyway... and I don't want another messaging app, already have Watsapp, Facebook, Skype, text, Google - need something which will consolidate all these.

People use what their personal networks use - mine (at least) have already chosen theirs.

[cjpatten]

Re: Wait for BBM?

Telefonica's TU go?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Wait for BBM?

I don't know what business school BBM management went to but they've never heard of the network effect. They had the early mover advantage and completely wasted it.