Considered one of the most secure messaging applications at one time, BlackBerry Messenger, is officially shutting down today. BBM as it is popularly known, has seen a steady decline in users thanks largely to the arrival of competitors like WhatsApp, Telegram, Line, WeChat, and so on. While BBM’s secure messaging pitch did attract plenty of customers, especially enterprise driven users, things changed the moment its rivals adopted security oriented end-to-end encryption, thus pretty much leveling the playing field.
Many might not know that BlackBerry Messenger was acquired by Indonesia based media giant Elang Mahkota Teknologi (Emtek) for $207.5 million roughly around three years ago. The idea was to bring all of the local Indonesian TV channels and original content to BBM users in the country.
In what was considered a last attempt at survival, the company even added the Uber app into BBM. Clearly, this didn’t work out all too well as keeping customers onboard became a challenge.
“We poured our hearts into making this a reality, and we are proud of what we have built to date,” BlackBerry wrote in a blog post. “The technology industry however, is very fluid, and in spite of our substantial efforts, users have moved on to other platforms, while new users proved difficult to sign on,” thus officially marking the closure of one of the most promising instant messaging applications of our time.
For those who are blindsided by this move, there are several alternatives worth checking out including services like Line, Telegram, Signal etc. BBM users can also use BBM Enterprise as an alternative for the time being.