BBM used to be an incredibly popular and exclusive messaging application for BlackBerry devices, but as BlackBerry continued to lose their market share in the smartphone market, we guess they decided the next best thing was to open up the app to other platforms, like iOS, Android, and even Windows Phone, essentially covering all their bases.
So with BBM now available on more platforms, how is the messaging app doing? Well according to BlackBerry’s CEO, John Chen, he revealed during the company’s recent earnings call that BBM now had 160 million registered users across the board, with about 85 million active users a month, 50 million of which are BlackBerry users, which is actually pretty impressive.
That number is also expected to rise to 100 million active users when BBM for Windows Phone is released, which for now has been pegged for July. It’s actually a bit disconcerting to think that out of the total registered users, only half are active. We’re not sure why this is or what it means, but it could be a sign that perhaps not many users are particularly engaged enough to make BBM their primary messaging application.
To put it into perspective, other messaging platforms like WhatsApp currently has half a billion active users, probably more now since that was reported two months ago. Another messaging app from China, WeChat, has reported several months ago that it had 355 million active users with 1 million signups per day, so safe to say that BlackBerry still has a long way to go before it can catchup.
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