BBM is on the up right now as BlackBerry recently announced that it has clocked 100 million downloads after a year and half of being launched on Google Play Store. While that seems a massive achievement for BlackBerry, the company has even more reason to be happy as stickers have been sent more than a billion times by users all over the world according to a statement on the company’s official website.
“BBM for Android has officially achieved a milestone on the Google Play Store: 100 million installs. That puts BBM in the top tier of messaging apps on Google Play, and we got there in a little over a year as we first posted BBM for Android in late October 2013. We have 3.7 million reviews, and just shy of 2.4 million of them are five stars.”
While this is a milestone, and worth a mention, it is also significant to add that BBM on Android is just one of a couple of other OS where the messenger is being downloaded and used by people. BBM is also available on Windows Phone, iOS and not to forget BlackBerry devices.
On stickers, which are as big as ones being used by other big apps, BlackBerry said its users have sent more than 1 billion of them. BlackBerry also announced, of course, with ‘satisfaction’ that its messenger app is gaining “tremendous momentum” at the moment:
“100 million is great, but a billion is even better. BBM users have now sent more than 1 billion stickers. And we are achieving 1 billion virtual goods impressions in the BBM Shop monthly. All these numbers just go to show the tremendous momentum behind BBM right now.”
Downloads are however, not the same thing as active users as a lot still needs to be done by the company in this direction.
Earlier in the week, BlackBerry updated BBM with addition of custom pins for its users. Users who want ads removed from the service will have to pay a monthly recurring subscription fee of $0.99, and another $1.99 every month to get a custom PIN.
Group chat also got an update as the company has added supports for photo sharing. Images will now be displayed in-line and also saved to the Pictures section of each group where users can decide to like and also comment on them.
“You can now share a photo while having a group conversation. These photos are also saved to the Pictures section of your group, allowing you to still “like” and comment on them.”
