BlackBerry Delays Launch of BBM Apps For iOS, Android 54
USA Today reports: "BlackBerry on Saturday hit pause on the rollout of iPhone and Android apps for its popular BlackBerry Messenger mobile social messaging service after an unreleased version of the Android app was posted online. That version saw 1.1 million active users in the first 8 hours, the company said, but the unofficial version "caused issues," which the company continued to address throughout the day. The company did not specify what the issues were."
Dead man tries to walk, trips and falls... (Score:2, Interesting)
The one part of Blackberry's business that might be attractive to an outside buyer is its secure email hosting. If they can't even get that right with iOS & Android apps, what's left? Truly this is a zombie company with both of its arms falling off. The demise of BB hardware could be blamed in part to 'market forces,' but BB has no one to blame for the failure of its software developers and managers.
Re:At least it's a business plan (Score:1, Interesting)
> 2. They also have a brand recognition and reputation in the corporate/government world that any company would love to have.
Except for the most die-hard, must control absolutely everything, BB has been losing share to iOS and Android for quite some time. And the Playbook and BBOS10, they shot their reputation for quality in the foot. Mediocre hardware, with a slow, buggy OS slapped on it, that clearly was incomplete and not ready for general use when it shipped [but which they had to ship, just to have something less than 3 years old in the marketplace].
They still have the market for people that demand a physical keyboard cornered. Unfortunately, that is only a couple of percentage of the smartphone market, and shrinking daily.
Given that they've been actively shopping BB for months, and that it's been in the same position as Palm was for more than a year, and NOBODY has made any real effort to acquire it [well, an ex-CEO is trying to buy it and take it private, but that's going to be a hard sell, unless he is just going to flip it], BB's patents don't seem to be making anyone drool, and BES isn't going to do it [as IT really doesn't want to run a parallel email system to Exchange, which most, including BB's new phones, can directly connect to].
And BBM isn't growing, as there are things like unlimited SMS, twitter, facebook, besides other messaging services, which also support strong encryption. If anything BBM is a little like Microsoft Office. It's why people chose BB devices awhile ago, but it hasn't transitioned well to the latest devices, and there are now a bunch of competing services that work more than good enough, for free, to make people want to pay extra to use this service, just to communicate with fewer and fewer people. And kudos to BB, for successfully botching their "launch" of BBM on iOS and Android this weekend. They are true masters of ineptitude.
Sabotage? (Score:5, Interesting)
The conspiracy theorist ideas inside me tell me sabotage may be involved. I don't buy that a beta version caused server issues that prompted to halt the rollout.
40% of the company was canned.
The ios version (which i got by creating an Australia account) also had issues with connecting, which is expected. I don't think Blackberry was ready for this.